There's a subtle shift happening in how businesses buy AI. Have you spotted it?
For the last eighteen months, the conversation has been dominated by "What can the model do?" We’ve all been staring at benchmark charts like they were football league tables. But this week, the vibe shifted. People have stopped asking about the plumbing and started asking about the water.
The focus has moved from the raw power of the LLM to the speed of the business execution. It turns out, nobody cares if your AI can write a sonnet in Swahili if it can't help them clear their inbox before 5 PM.
I’m genuinely buzzing about this shift. We’re moving out of the "magic trick" phase of AI and into the "useful tool" phase. It might be less flashy, but it’s a hell of a lot more profitable.
New LLM Benchmarks and the Reality of Model Fatigue
We saw more updates from the big players this week, with incremental gains in reasoning and coding capabilities. But here is the thing: the gap between "State of the Art" and "Good Enough" is closing faster than a laptop during a boring Zoom call.
For most agency owners and small businesses, the specific model matters less than how you've integrated it. Whether it's a 2% improvement in MMLU scores or a slightly faster tokens-per-second rate, the bottleneck isn't the AI anymore. It's the human sitting in front of it.
If you’re still waiting for the "perfect" model before you start automating your workflows, you’re essentially waiting for a faster car while your competitors are already halfway across the country in a Ford Fiesta. Speed of implementation is the only benchmark that pays the bills.
Why Business Execution Speed is the New Gold Standard
This week, I’ve been obsessed with the idea of execution. I talked about this on Saturday in Weekly AI News Roundup: Why Business Execution Speed Beats Model Benchmarks.
The news cycle is full of stories about companies laying off thousands of workers and citing "AI efficiencies." While that makes for a grim headline, the underlying reality for the rest of us is that AI allows smaller, leaner teams to move at a pace that used to require a department of fifty.
If you aren't using this tech to reclaim your time, you're missing the point. On Sunday, I broke down some Practical AI Workflows for Better Business Execution Speed. The goal isn't to over-engineer a complex system; it's to fix the bottlenecks that stop you from doing the work that actually matters.
Selling the Outcome, Not the Engine
I’ve noticed that the most successful AI implementations right now are the ones where the client doesn't even know AI is involved. They just know their lead response time went from four hours to four seconds.
On Monday, I explored Effective AI Sales Strategies That Actually Close Deals in 2024. The takeaway was simple: stop pitching "AI" and start pitching saved hours and increased revenue.
When you focus on the tech, you invite skepticism. When you focus on the transformation, you invite a signature on the dotted line. To help keep these conversations human, I also shared my thoughts on How to Conduct a Discovery Call Without Sounding Like a Police Interrogator. If you're still treating sales like a cross-examination, you're scaring away the exact people you want to help.
Navigating the Hallucinations and Platform Updates
It hasn't all been smooth sailing this week. We’ve seen more high-profile cases of AI gone wrong—chatbots offering legal advice they shouldn't or inventing non-existent company policies.
In Tuesday's post, Why Your AI Strategy is Currently Hallucinating Success, I looked at how to avoid the "car salesman chatbot" trap. It’s about building guardrails and having a solid beta testing strategy before you let your AI loose on the public.
Speaking of tools, the updates to platforms like GoHighLevel have been a breath of fresh air for those of us in the agency space. As I discussed on Wednesday, the New GoHighLevel Features are finally catching up to the needs of modern business owners who need consolidated tech stacks.
Key Trends Moving the Needle This Week
If you’re looking for a summary of where to focus your energy next week, here are the patterns I’ve seen emerging from my consulting sessions:
- Website Feedback Loops: Clients are using AI to critique their own landing pages through the eyes of their ideal customer. It’s brutal, but incredibly effective.
- Time Zone Alignment: As teams become more global and asynchronous, using AI to manage communication across time zones is becoming a major productivity win.
- Discovery Mastery: There’s a huge push to move away from rigid scripts and toward fluid, AI-assisted conversations that build genuine trust.
- Beta Testing Strategy: Serious businesses are finally moving away from "launch and pray" to structured testing phases for their AI tools.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed by all these moving parts, you might want to book a consultation to help cut through the noise. Alternatively, if you're looking for more articles on AI, I've got a whole library of them.
And since it's Thursday, don't forget to get the free book which dives deeper into these execution strategies.
The Trajectory: From Toys to Tools
The overall theme of this week is maturity. We are growing out of the "wow" factor and into the "how" factor.
The winners this week weren't the ones who tweeted about the latest model release; they were the ones who took an existing tool and shaved twenty minutes off a daily task. Those twenty minutes, compounded across a week, are worth more than any benchmark score.
Keep focused on the execution. Everything else is just expensive background noise.
I publish a weekly roundup every Saturday at steventann.com. If you found this useful, there's plenty more where this came from.
About the Author
Steven Tann is an AI consultant, author of "You're Selling AI Wrong", and founder of SalesM8. He writes about AI, sales, and running a business from a narrowboat on the English canals. Connect with him at steventann.com.
