This is John Batchster, conversation with my good colleague, Gene Marks, a small business columnist for the Guardian, for the Philadelphia and Quar, other distinguished publications, about AI and small business.

Where is it? Where is it going? Right now, experimenting. I use it for copy editing. Gene also writes with it. However, what's in the immediate future is something called

agents, agents in the AI. Coming to your website, you're handled by an agent who answers your questions,

sends you documents, even bills you if there is a service that's in the question. Agents,

your colleagues will become robots in the machine.

Here's Gene to explain, much more of this later. And we always cover AI week to week.

I have to double check and triple check anything that I asked these chatbots about,

particularly if I'm using them in my writing right now.

But that's what businesses are doing right now is just that. Now, that's going to change.

And it's going to change a lot in the next couple of years. A lot of the biggest companies from

Microsoft to Salesforce.com to Google are just now beginning to roll out agents.

Agents are going to take generative AI one step further.

And we'll be seeing a lot of that in 2025, John,

where now applications will not only be able to look up and find answers to things,

but then do stuff about it.

So, for example, if a customer comes to your website and is using, you know, and has a

question, an agent that you have on your website and AI agent can not only research and

use generative AI to answer that person's question, but then depending on the response,

can then open up a service ticket for that customer and then forward that service ticket to somebody then who picks it up to deal with it and solve the problem.

Or an agent can respond to a customer request and automatically send an email back out, attaching to it a document or a proposal or a brochure to it.