This week OpenAI laid out its vision for the AI economy. Public wealth funds. Robot taxes. A four-day workweek. Big, sweeping ideas about how society reorganizes around the technology, and the people thinking ten years out are doing necessary work. We will need a version of that conversation eventually.
Meanwhile, the conversation I had with a business owner this week was about how to pull a heavy load of repetitive manual work off his team, the kind that has been slowing them down for months without anyone quite naming it.
Both of these are real conversations. They are happening in the same week, about the same technology. One is happening in conference rooms in San Francisco. The other is happening at kitchen tables, in coffee shops, in co-working spaces, in small offices tucked into towns nobody is writing think pieces about, where someone is trying to serve their customers, keep good people, stay profitable, and maybe sleep through the night.
The macro conversation matters. But if you are running a small business right now, the conversation that actually shapes your year is the smaller, quieter one. The one about the specific thing your business needs to keep moving, with the people and the hours you already have.
That is the room I spend most of my time in, and it is the one I would bet most of the real progress is going to happen in. One small business at a time, mostly without anyone writing about it.