Are You Tired Of AI Yet?

Feb 18
5 min read

Happy Friday Y’all!

Welcome to the first edition of the Weekly Re-Up. This newsletter will be sent out Fridays, at 8am EST!

Please share this newsletter with a fellow business owner for news in tech, business and small/medium industry tips.

The Ugly AI

“Bubble Burst”

A song from Swedish melodic skate-punk band, Adhesive.

We all remember that one AI generated video of Will Smith eating spaghetti. A gritty and textured video generation that skirt the line of uncanny and just horrifying. When we all first saw that video, we all innocently believed that this would never be too harmful to consume, and for a while it was innocent.

In November of 2022, Sam Altmans' OpenAI came out with Chat-GPT. A generative tool that relies on transformers, using a large language model or an LLM to produce text, speech, & later images. This opened up a whole new level of generative AI, a level of technology that I don’t believe the world was ready for. Became one of the world’s fastest growing user base, even surpassing, YouTube in volume search. All while, artificial-intelligence had been on the rise for quite some time, actually a couple decades, this marked a turn in innovation.

OpenAI, Claude, Google Gemini & Anthropic all racing to the bottom to be the best AI tech company… So, where does the bottom fall out?

Let’s take a look at the company UpWork.

UpWork is a freelancer platform that allows freelancers to directly bid for jobs that “clients” or businesses put up. It is essentially a bid-for-employment. As a fellow UpWork freelancer, I can see from the inside where the company is beginning to rely on AI.

Like all good CEO’s Hayden Brown, in my opinion, has done well with the monetization of the platform - turning it from a $10M startup to over $750M in revenue, according to her LinkedIn profile. After all, a company needs to make money right?

The problem sits where false promises and weak financial projections meet. Brown, and other CEO’s have raked in investment and consumer cash but are realizing that relying on an AI model to run facets of your business are not nearly as profitable as first perceived. On top of that, the average consumer is starting to understand the value AI really brings to the table - not much.

Uh oh, they’ve been duped.

Well actually, we all have been duped.

Other than “speed” AI hasn’t really been a game changer like everyone thought it would. Now yes, you can argue -

“Well, it’s still in the beginning stages”

Yeah, sure.. but where do we start drawing limits on what these companies can extract from using their AI products AND how far will we let artificial-intelligence go to run our lives?

Many investors are beginning to see the “writing on the wall” and are selling off shares at a quick pace. The reality is, this bubble is definitely about to burst.

Hey, we haven’t even began to mention all the other negative effects of using AI tools like Chat-GPT, DALLE & SORA AI on a daily. We will touch on all these topics on more over the next few newsletters. Just know, this blog was written by humans - for humans! It’s truly sad we have to even say that.

Some AI may have been harmed in doing research for this post

Small Business Strategy

Let’s talk shop y'all - I want to hear back.

What are your top 3 strategies for maintaining profitability in your business, or if you aren’t profitable yet - what strategies are implementing to get to profitability?

I started The Sonoran Bean, a small coffee bean coffee company back in 2023 - my goal was to provide “coffee shop-quality coffee” to my community without breaking their bank. In full transparency, my business didn’t succeed. While I could make up a 1000 reasons why we didn’t make it past our third year, it was really simple actually - process.

I’ve learned that being a business owner is not necessarily about luck, but about planning and strategy. To be honest, as a young business owner the first thing you want to do is just take the title (CEO, Founder, etc) and run with it but a lot of of the time you don’t even what that means or how to do it.

In 2026, there are three strategies you absolutely need to be implementing into your business. If you agree with me, feel free to email back and we can talk more about how this topic because I would love to hear more from y'all!

My Top 3 Strategies for 2026

Lean Process Building
What is this? Look at all your current processes work through them one by one. And if they don’t directly make sense or make you money, cut it. The idea is to run as efficient and lean as possible.
Invest In Humans
Now more than ever is the time to invest into humans and human work.
Why? Because a lot of companies are not, and if we’ve learned anything from the pandemic, the companies that invest directly back into their workforce, obviously with some exceptions, were the ones that came out on top. If it hasn’t been cleared yet, we are against AI and that alone is a reason enough to hire humans.
Marketing
It’s as simple as it sounds, but you can’t just randomly market your brand. Along with everything else you need to have a plan and for marketing you need to have a budget without a budget. It will be very difficult for you to track what’s working and what’s not working and I understand as a small business owner it’s hard to see dollars in the future, but trust me it’s imperative.

Now again, these three strategies are just strategies that I have observed to be the most important going into this year. Honestly, it’s never too late to re-organize your policy to make it leaner more efficient and to clean up your operations to make them more profitable and return on your investments. If you feel like you need some clarity or guidance on building and implementing lean strategies in your business feel free to email us back, and we can always set up a consultation to dig in deeper.

Cheers! Until next week -

Austin Pischner

The Spotlight

We need to lift each other up, especially in the small business world. That is why I chose Nishia as our first business spotlight.

Visit Nishia’s Website

Need Something Positive?

Scientists Restore Knee Cartilage using Targeting Injections —-> Click Me

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