Perkins SmartOps

05/06/2026

Logging supplier bills used to be my own quiet headache. Invoices landed in my inbox and sat there until I finally found an hour to go into Xero, key in each one, check the details, and attach the file. So I built something to do it for me. Now when a bill arrives I drag it into a folder. On the hour, an automation picks it up, reads the invoice, and logs it into Xero as a draft bill with all the details filled in and the PDF attached. Then it tells me it is done. All I do now is glance over the drafts every so often and approve them. That is what AI and automation actually means, real work that happens without you, not a cleverer way to write one email.

03/06/2026

Open ChatGPT, ask a question, read the answer. It is fine. It is also the same flat default voice. Mine does not sound like that, because I spent twenty minutes setting it up. Custom instructions telling it how I write, what I care about, and what to never do. It becomes a different tool once you do that, and hardly anyone bothers. That is the pattern with AI right now. The defaults are average, the distance from average to genuinely good is small, and people rarely cross it, because they did not know there was a gap to cross. Next week, what good actually looks like.

01/06/2026

It is easy to use ChatGPT for a few things, get decent results, and conclude you are doing AI. That is a fair start, and it genuinely helps. But it is the front door, not the house. The distance between asking a chatbot a question and having parts of your business run themselves is enormous. The catch is you cannot see it from the front door. You get a useful answer, decide you are sorted, and stop looking. That is nobody doing it wrong. It is that no one has shown you what sits on the other side of the door. Worth a moment next time you hear someone say they have AI covered.

Call now to connect with business.

25/05/2026

DeepSeek made a 75% price cut on their frontier AI model permanent. Roughly 20x cheaper than the Western alternatives.

I have not used it in any client work yet, but there is no reason I would not. For the right workload, DeepSeek is now firmly on the shortlist.

The bigger signal is this. Cost stopped being a credible reason not to use AI last week.

The main thing when using any AI model is the same as it has always been. Do your due diligence and protect client confidentiality.

24/05/2026

Three competing AI labs just agreed on the same standard. That does not happen often.

OpenAI, Eleven Labs and Kakao have all signed up to SynthID, Google’s invisible watermark for AI-generated images and video. Over 100 billion files already carry it. From this summer, Search and Chrome will let anyone check whether an image is AI-made and whether it has been edited.

Why this matters for small businesses: reputation attacks via fabricated images are already happening. AI-generated “photos” of your premises. Fake screenshots of a director saying things they did not say. Doctored “incident” images circulated by a disgruntled customer or a competitor. Until now the response has been “trust us, that is not real”. That has never been a real defence.

It is not solved. SynthID can be stripped by a determined attacker, only catches output from labs that opted in, and still relies on someone actually checking. But three rivals agreeing on one standard is the kind of news the AI industry rarely produces.

Worth marking.

20/05/2026

Gemini in Gmail can now reply for you. Not draft. Reply.

If your business pays someone to run an inbox, the work just changed. The routine, high-volume replies are collapsible. The judgement calls and the unusual asks aren't.

The question is what proportion is which.

18/05/2026

Microsoft sold you Copilot. OpenAI sold you ChatGPT Enterprise. You think you've seen AI.

You haven't.

The Register reported yesterday on how "agent harnesses" are quietly changing what AI can actually do. The chatbots are the surface. The harness underneath is where the work happens.

An agent harness gives an AI model three things a chatbot doesn't have:

→ Context. It knows your data, your rules, your history.
→ Tools. It can read files, send emails, query systems, write to spreadsheets.
→ Skills. It follows your specific playbooks, not generic instructions.

The same model in a chatbot vs the same model in a harness is the difference between a calculator and an accountant.

Plenty of UK businesses bought the chatbot. They're paying £20-30 per seat per month for roughly 10% of what AI does. Meanwhile the harnessed version sits in someone else's stack, running their invoicing, their timesheet reconciliation, their client onboarding.

Story: theregister.com/ai-ml/2026/05/17/how-ai-agent-harnesses-like-openclaw-are-changing-llms-inference-and-cpus/