THE NUMBER
Americans filed nearly 5 million applications to start a business in the first nine months of 2026, the most for that stretch on record, by the Census Bureau’s count. Only 1.39 million of them had the marks of a business likely to hire someone, which works out to a little more than 1 in 4. I run one of the businesses this boom is made of, and I don’t have any employees.
2 THINGS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW
AI was part of why he left IT. Now it writes what he might have hired a writer for
Shahezad Contractor runs Cousin’s Food Inc., a group of halal restaurants in Philadelphia, and AI tools like Claude write his marketing copy and his staff training materials. He spent 24 years in IT, and the way AI was spreading across the tech industry was part of why he left in 2024. “Previously, maybe I would have hired a content writer,” he told CNBC Make It.
A Houston bookseller got a 70-book order in one night and pulled his books from the site
In April, Charlie Becker started seeing strange online orders at Becker’s Books, the Houston shop his parents opened: four, five, six, seven books at once, on subjects that had nothing to do with each other. Booksellers around the world were coming to believe that AI companies were buying old books to scan them and throw away the paper, and Becker and his parents agreed to keep watching before they jumped to that conclusion. Then the orders got bigger. “That night, we got a single order for 70 books, which is unheard of,” he told Straight Arrow News. He pulled his books from the platform entirely. Now he’s using AI to build a catalog of how many copies of each old book are still out there, so a seller with a strange order can ask first, in his words, “Oh my God, am I the last person who has this book?”
THE DEEP DIVE
I couldn’t check their corners. I can check mine.
On October 22, I went to the Pasadena Chamber of Commerce’s economic summit at Brookside Golf Club. The speakers made the case for data centers. More data centers means more AI, they said, and AI lets a small business take on work that used to need a whole team and a lot more money. Building the data centers creates short-term jobs along the way, and we’re in the biggest boom of self-started small businesses.
I agree, because I’m living it. I build software that businesses can run on, and AI lets me build full platforms and apps in days instead of years.
What I wanted to ask was whether all of it is being built without cutting corners. We talk a lot about the short-term jobs. Are the people doing them paid fairly, and do they get benefits and health insurance? What does the building cost the environment and the community around it? The speakers weren’t taking questions, and I get it, that wasn’t the time or the place.
So I had my AI employees pull the public record on one real case: Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where Google and the data center company QTS are building two data centers. The city gave Google a 70 percent tax exemption for 20 years, a $56 million break, The Gazette reported, and the city’s agreements require the two projects to create at least 61 permanent jobs between them. The mayor says QTS runs a closed-loop water system. State officials also found 40 unpermitted wells at that same site, KCRG reported.
That’s the kind of corner I mean. There may be a good explanation, and from Pasadena I can’t tell. The other corner I couldn’t find in anything I read: whether the people building these sites get benefits and health insurance.
I can’t check Cedar Rapids’ corners. I can check mine. I use AI pretty much every day. Only about 1 in 4 of this year’s applications to start a business looked likely to hire anyone, and I don’t have any employees myself. That’s a corner too, and the least I can do is be straight about it with the people I work for.
ONE THING TO TRY THIS WEEK
Week 1 of 4: Tell your customers how you use AI
Here’s mine. Nobody really asks me how I use AI. If they did, I’d tell them I direct it, and it does the work of employees I don’t have. Your customers may be wondering the same thing about you: in a survey released in 2024 by Gartner, a business research firm, 64% of the 5,728 customers it asked said they’d prefer companies didn’t use AI for customer service, and their top worries included having a harder time reaching a person and AI taking people’s jobs. That’s the reason to tell them yourself, plainly, before they guess. This week you’ll write your answer down for your customers, in sentences you could say to their face, and fix the one line you can’t. It takes about 20 minutes, plus the fix.
List every place AI touches your customers: your replies, your quotes, your booking messages, your posts. Then pick the one it touches most and imagine a customer asks you, “Did a person write this?” Say your answer out loud, then write it down word for word. If you paused before you answered, that’s where this starts. No customers yet? Use the people who already get something your AI made, like someone you email about your idea or the people who read your posts.
Open the AI chat you already use. Paste this, with your own words in the brackets: “Here are the places AI touches my customers: [list every one you can think of]. Here’s what I’d say if a customer asked ‘Did a person write this?’ about [the place from step 1]: [your answer]. Ask me about each place, one question at a time: who’s on the other end, whether they know AI is involved, and what a person checks before it reaches them. Then write a short note called ‘How we use AI,’ addressed to my customers, with one plain sentence for each place, in words I could say to a customer’s face. Mark every line I couldn’t say to them, based on my answers, and tell me which one to fix first.”
Fix the first marked line this week, one of three ways. Tell your customers AI is involved, with a line on the reply, the booking page or the quote. Have a person check it before it goes out. Or stop using AI for that one.
Post the note where your customers will see it: your website, your booking page, the front desk or the bottom of your emails. If the 64% makes you nervous about a sign at the front desk, start with the bottom of your emails. From now on, any new AI tool that touches a customer gets its line on the note before you turn it on.
Stuck? Reply to this email. I’ll help.
WHAT’S COMING
Next issue: what your customers tell you, and where it goes after you paste it into an AI tool. You’ll find out what each of your tools keeps and which switches you can flip.
Written by Manu (Mo), with help from the AI tools I discuss.