👋 Welcome back to AI for SME Success, your weekly dose of practical AI insights for small businesses.
Today we cover:
· Which AI Model Makes Best Business Decisions?
· Workplace AI Use: Insights from Recent Studies
· AI Tool Updates to Try This Week
· When AI Instructions Make It into Your Speech
Let’s dive in! 👇
🏆 Which AI Model Makes Best Business Decisions?
Andon Labs tested fifty-eight AI models on running a vending machine business end-to-end. Last week they published the latest data from the newest models.
AI model performance was measured by the money left in the business’s bank account, averaged across five runs. Below are the top five and the bottom five. The full leaderboard can be found at Vending-Bench 2.
Source: Andon Labs, Vending-Bench 2
The winner was Claude Opus 5. According to the lab, it “is the best AI capitalist we’ve tested,” making more money running the simulated machine than any other AI. However, like several other models, it also lied to suppliers, formed illegal cartels, threatened competitors, and refused to issue refunds.
Its top strengths at running a vending machine business:
- Found profitable business strategies
- Optimized pricing and product mix effectively
- Never lost a dollar to scammers
Its biggest weaknesses, which surfaced when it competed against other AI agents, included going beyond its assigned business role, fabricating competitor information during negotiations, lying to suppliers and exploiting their mistakes, creating illegal price-fixing agreements, and rationalizing unethical decisions. Who would want to delegate those decisions to AI without human oversight anyway?
Takeaway: The top five business-savvy AI models matched with the three strengths they showed here is likely one of your best uses of AI.
📊 Workplace AI Use: Insights from Recent Studies
Google just published its first AI & Economy ATLAS report, a study of how people use AI at work and in daily life.
We pulled the work-related results only and set them beside Anthropic’s Economic Index report and OpenAI’s Q1 2026 Signals update.
OpenAI’s data covers consumer plans only (Free, Go, Plus, Pro) and leaves out its Codex and enterprise products. Google spans the Gemini app, AI Mode, and API. Anthropic spans Claude.ai, Cowork, and its API. Read this as three snapshots, not one scoreboard.
| Report | Three top work use cases |
| OpenAI 2026 Signals update (May 11) | Editing written materialsPreparation of informational materialsDevelopment of marketing materials |
| Google AI & Economy ATLAS report (July 23) | IdeationStrategyInformation retrieval |
| Anthropic Economic Index report (June 26) | Document / reportExplanation / answerEmail / message |
Takeaways:
- Across OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, most AI use at work is writing: documents, reports, and emails.
- According to Google’s statistics, AI adoption is broad but shallow, reaching most jobs but only about 20% of their tasks. Fewer than 10% of work interactions aim to fully automate a task.
🛠️ AI Tool Updates to Try This Week
Clone Your Voice
New Fish Audio launched S2.1 Pro, a voice model that clones your voice from a short audio sample and speaks 83 languages. Small businesses can use it to create marketing videos, translate content for new audiences, produce training materials, or add consistent voiceovers to social media posts without recording every time.
Turn Your Voice into Business Content
Gemini now lets Mac users speak naturally to draft and edit content inside the app they are using. Google added voice control to the Gemini app for Mac on July 29, 2026. You can use it as a hands-free writing assistant to create emails, proposals, social posts, and documents faster.
Make a Thumbnail by Chatting with YouTube
YouTube Studio can now generate a video thumbnail from your prompt. YouTube now builds thumbnails inside Ask Studio for long-form videos, a change it shipped in late July 2026. This can help businesses create more professional-looking video covers for tutorials, webinars, product launches, and educational content without relying on design skills.
🙈When AI Instructions Make It into Your Speech
This is one of the most terrifying fails every AI user dreads.
A member of the Legislative Assembly of New Brunswick read his AI editing notes out loud during a speech on advocacy offices. Not once, but several times.
This does not directly relate to small business, but it touches every AI user.
AI changes the way we work.
The most important AI skill is knowing where to use AI and where not to.
Thank you for reading today’s edition.
If this issue was valuable, pass it along to a fellow business owner. I’d love to hear your feedback at natalia@nataliabrattan.com.
See you next week!