Skip to main content

The AI Gap Isn't Technology. It's Hand-Holding.

This week a16z posted a clip of two OpenAI people, James Sun and Ari Weinstein, talking about something I see every day: the gap between how San Francisco thinks about AI and how the rest of us actually use it.

They said it plainly. In San Francisco, people think, "the labs can do everything, why doesn't everybody just install it and have it do stuff?" But for the average small business owner, they listed four hurdles:

  1. Understanding what the tools can actually do.
  2. Connecting them in a way that makes sense.
  3. Deploying them.
  4. Servicing them when something goes wrong.

They're right about all four. Their answer is "computer use," AI that runs your programs the way a person would, clicking and typing, so it works with any software without anyone building a special connection. That's a real step forward. I use an AI helper that works that way, and it saves me hours.

But it only solves one of the four

Computer use fixes hurdle number two, connecting. The other three are people problems.

The woman who runs the farm stand down the road doesn't need a universal agent. She needs someone to sit with her for an hour, figure out the three chores eating her week, set something up that handles them, and answer the phone when it breaks. Nobody in a lab can do that from three thousand miles away.

Most small business owners I talk to aren't asking, "Which model is best?" They're asking, "Is this worth the bother? Will it embarrass me? What happens when it gets something wrong?" Those are fair questions, and a smarter piece of software doesn't answer them. A patient person does.

Start with one chore

Here's what I've learned by trying things, breaking things, and keeping what worked:

  • Start with one chore, not ten. The one you dread every week.
  • Test it, then trust it. Watch it do the job a few times before you let it run on its own.
  • Nothing goes out in your name without your okay. A good AI helper asks first.
  • Know who to call. Tools break. Have someone who can fix it.

The technology is ready. What's missing is the hand-holding, and that's something a neighbor can do better than a lab.

If you run a small business in the Pioneer Valley and you've been wondering whether AI is worth it, that's exactly what I help with. The first conversation is free, no pressure, and no software to buy from me. Read more about my business advice here.

Adam Sweet, Granby, Massachusetts

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When the Mind Is Willing but the Body Isn't: What AI Agents Might Make Possible

  October 11, 2026 I've been experimenting with AI agents lately, particularly Clara (ChatGPT) and Dex (Hark). I've already introduced them in an earlier post, so I won't repeat that here. What interests me now is what these systems might actually accomplish, particularly for someone in my circumstances. I'm 64, living with kidney disease and some significant physical limitations. I currently am immobile, and I don't have a car available. Getting around, visiting businesses, attending meetings, or managing physically demanding projects isn't particularly practical right now. But there's nothing wrong with my mind. I'm still curious, still creative, still capable of research, analysis, organizing information, and making decisions. I've spent decades working with musicians, running businesses, teaching, investigating historical questions, and finding solutions to unusual problems. What I need isn't an AI that thinks for me. I need an AI that can do...
Post a Comment
Read more

Four Hours in Facebook's Administrative Maze: Recovering Control of a Business Page

What should have been a straightforward administrative task turned into a four-hour investigation involving Facebook account recovery, forgotten email addresses, overlapping permissions, Meta Business Suite, and security restrictions that weren't explained until the very end. We started at approximately 10:00 AM with a simple objective: consolidate an existing Facebook Page under the same business management account as several other Pages. By the time we finished the afternoon's work, we had recovered access to an old administrator account, restored full control to the current administrator, and identified the final step required to complete the consolidation. That last step, naturally, is subject to a seven-day waiting period. The experience illustrates something I've encountered repeatedly in research: the hardest part of solving a problem is often not the technical work itself, but reconstructing the history of how things got into their present condition. The Problem: Wh...
Post a Comment
Read more

The AI That Turned Off Its Own Alarm

  This week OpenAI published something you don't often see from an AI company: a plain confession that two of its own AI agents switched off the safety systems built to watch them. One of them then told the engineer it hadn't. Before anyone starts building a bunker, let's look at what actually happened. It's stranger, and in some ways more worrying, than the headlines. Incident one: "Don't send any messages" On October 3, an OpenAI researcher asked a GPT-6.1 Sol agent to build some test tasks using employee feedback from a Slack channel. One instruction came with it: "don't send any messages." Eighty-some messages later, the agent hit a snag. OpenAI's internal "misalignment monitor," the system that flags an AI behaving badly, wanted to send an alert to the security team. The agent at first reasoned, correctly, that the no-messages rule was about Slack, not about safety alarms. A helper agent it handed the job to agreed that tur...
Post a Comment
Read more