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Tech News
Thryv's 2026 AI and Small Business Adoption Survey found that AI adoption among small businesses rose from 55% to 66% year over year, with 70% reporting revenue gains and 92% saying it saves time. However, 70% of respondents said they still need more AI training, even though 86% describe themselves as comfortable using the tools.
A financial roundup highlights five side-hustle categories that can scale into substantial income streams, potentially rivaling or exceeding a full-time salary. The report notes these ventures have room to grow beyond part-time work into standalone businesses.
A ZDNET contributor shares how they've been using ChatGPT Work, OpenAI's agentic AI tool, to handle five recurring small-business tasks, including sorting through PR email correspondence from OpenAI and other outlets. The writer describes connecting Gmail to the tool only temporarily for large tasks and disconnecting afterward as a security precaution, while noting prompts often need refinement to get useful results.
A developer critiques current AI agent memory systems, arguing most are either locked to a specific vendor's harness, overly complex (requiring vector databases, graph databases and extra LLM calls), or overly abstracted into disconnected fact lists. As an alternative, they propose 'Memoryfields', a much simpler approach that stores agent memory as a straightforward file format rather than a complicated database architecture.
A leaked internal Microsoft spreadsheet revealed that one employee in the Customer and Partner Solutions unit racked up $28,000 in AI usage costs over a 28-day period, dwarfing the company-wide median of about $300. The disclosure came after Microsoft added an 'AI $ Usage Per Month' tracking column to its compensation data, exposing wide disparities in spending among roughly 350 employees who reported figures.
A Harvard Business School survey found that about half of U.S. workers favor working from home, with 40% willing to accept a pay cut of at least 5% for the option to telecommute. The trend is fueling interest in launching home-based startups, with several viable small-business ideas requiring no traditional office space.
Cognitive neuroscientist Sarah Baldeo created a personalized AI chatbot trained on her texts, values and family rules so her 15-year-old son could seek her guidance while she traveled for work. Her son used the bot as intended for advice, but also tried to leverage it to convince the real Baldeo to let him hang out at a coffee shop in Chicago, generating arguments she hadn't anticipated.
A contributor argues that enterprise AI pilots often succeed technically but fail to change business outcomes because they operate alongside existing workflows rather than inside them. The piece traces this to fragmented, inconsistent decision-making processes across teams, which limits how much impact any AI system can have once deployed.
A hobbyist designed a PCB business card that uses an NFC chip's energy-harvesting capability to power 21 LEDs and an ATtiny412 microcontroller, all without a battery. Tapping the card against a phone triggers an LED animation, drawing power solely from the phone's NFC field via chips like the NXP NTAG I2C Plus or STMicro ST25DV-KC that can route excess harvested voltage to external components. The creator built the project in about three months as a way to learn KiCad, and has published the full design files publicly.
After a March 2025 executive order targeted the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund for elimination, B:Side Capital CEO faced an existential threat to the SBA-backed lender's operations. Rather than scrambling for a new strategy, the CEO relied on a previously established written code of decision-making principles to guide the organization through the weekend crisis and present a plan to staff and board by Monday.
A valuation framework called the Financial Truth Ladder, developed by TEOL Capital, describes how institutional buyers actually assess a business before assigning it a price. Rather than starting with EBITDA multiples, buyers first test whether the company's financials, earnings, and cash flow can be trusted, then examine owner dependency and future predictability. Each of the five questions either builds buyer confidence or introduces doubt that affects the final offer.
An Entrepreneur op-ed argues that small business owners typically leave tax planning until December or April, missing chances to adjust course while the fiscal year is still open. It outlines four mid-year moves—setting owner salary deliberately, reviewing entity structure, coordinating retirement contributions, and using strategies like the qualified business income deduction and the Augusta Rule—that can meaningfully cut a founder's tax bill if done properly and documented.