The Working AI Playbook
Everything an AI agency knows about putting AI into a small business — published free, with receipts, no email gate.
Three levels — prompts you can use in the next ten minutes, systems you can set up in a working afternoon, and build-it-yourself projects for owners who like to tinker — plus a Local AI track for running the whole stack on your own hardware for $0/mo. Every chapter ships with a working artifact — a calculator, a prompt pack, real call audio, real data — not just advice.
Level 1 — Use AI today
Any owner. Nothing to install, nothing technical — copy, paste, done.
The daily-ops prompt pack
10 copy-paste prompts for the admin that eats your week: review replies (including the angry ones), estimate follow-ups, no-show reminders, invoice chasers, job posts.
Where AI is NOT safe in your business
HIPAA, legal confidentiality, and hallucinated pricing — the chapter on what to keep away from AI, and why that's half of using it well.
Level 2 — Set up systems
Owner or office manager, a working afternoon at a time. No code.
What missed calls actually cost (calculator)
Run your own numbers in 30 seconds, then compare the three fixes — answering service, AI receptionist, or a hire — like-for-like instead of trusting a vendor's ROI slide.
The AI receptionist pricing index (July 2026)
Every vendor's published pricing in one honest table — $20–$599/mo entry prices, the per-minute fee traps, who publishes nothing, and which tier you actually need. Our own row included.
Hear a real AI receptionist call
Actual call audio and transcripts — what it handles cleanly, and exactly where it still fumbles. Judge with your ears, not a demo reel.
AI search is eating local traffic — the 20-minute checkup
ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews now answer before your website gets a click. How to check what they say about your business and fix it.
Level 3 — Build it yourself
The owner who likes to tinker. Real tools, real costs, weekend-sized.
Your first business automation with Claude Code
A weekend project, start to finish: from blank folder to a working automation that does one boring job forever.
I audited my own 92 blog posts — 50 were invisible
The receipts chapter: our own Search Console data, what actually moved rankings, and what turned out to be wasted effort.
Local AI — the $0/mo track
Builders who want the whole stack on their own hardware — no API bill, no rate limits, receipts for every claim.
Run AI on a $600 Mac mini
What a base Mac mini actually runs well — models, speeds, and the honest limits — measured, not guessed.
Images without an image bill
A local image pipeline for blog headers and thumbnails: model choices, prompt doctrine, and when local quality is (and isn't) enough.
A voice for your content, rendered locally
Local text-to-speech that's good enough to narrate videos — with the licensing traps to avoid before you publish.
Music beds with no subscription
Generating usable background music on a 16GB machine: the settings that matter and the memory budget that bites.
The $0 video pipeline
Screencast + local narration + local music + local thumbnail — a full video pipeline that makes its own receipts.
Why give this away?
Because most of what gets sold to small businesses as "AI transformation" is an afternoon of setup behind a markup. We'd rather you know exactly what's easy — and do it yourself for free — than pay a hype tax for it.
Some parts genuinely are hard: 24/7 phone coverage that survives real customers, healthcare and legal compliance, integrations with your practice software, and getting cited by the AI engines your customers now ask instead of Google. When you hit those walls, that's the part we sell. Until then, the information is free and complete — every chapter says plainly where DIY works and where it breaks.
Get new chapters by email
Optional — everything here stays free and ungated either way. One email when a chapter publishes, nothing else.
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