In June 2026, expense software company Emburse published a survey of 2,000 workers in the US and UK. Four in ten US employees admitted using AI to generate a fake receipt for a business expense. Of those who did: - 19% used AI to fabricate a purchase entirely - 15% used it to inflate the value of a real one - 40% used AI tools their employer was paying for It is a vendor survey, so treat the exact numbers with care. But the direction is hard to argue with. A convincing receipt now takes seconds, and the old tells, such as odd fonts or a blurry photocopy, are disappearing. I trained in audit at PwC and KPMG. One principle from that world matters more than ever now: evidence from an independent source is more reliable than evidence produced by the person making the claim. A receipt is evidence from the claimant. A card transaction comes from the bank. That difference is now your best control. Five changes any business can make this month, no new software required: 1. Move to company cards where you can. The transaction record is created by the card provider, not the employee. 2. Match receipts to bank or card data, not to how real they look. If you cannot trace it to a transaction, treat it as unverified. 3. Update your policy wording. If it only mentions "altered" receipts, add "AI-generated or digitally fabricated". 4. Never change a supplier's bank details from an email. Call a number you already had on file, not one in the request. 5. Split the jobs. The person who adds a supplier should not be the person who approves the payment. Notice that none of these try to spot the fake by eye. That fight is already lost. The answer is to stop relying on the document and start relying on the source. AI makes forgery cheap. Good controls make it pointless. Which of these five does your business not have yet?

I'm looking for a small number of contributors for my third book, and I'd love to hear from people in this community. The book is The Human-Led, AI-Powered Decade: Foresight for Leaders Who Refuse to Be Surprised by 2036, Book Three in my Human-Led Leadership Series. It helps CEOs, CFOs and boards see the next ten years of work coming and act on it this year. Each contributed chapter, called "Voices from 2036", answers one question: What will your field have stopped doing by 2036, and what should a leader do about it this year? • One dated signal that the change has already started • One forecast that could be proved wrong • One action a leader could take this year You don't need to be a writer. A 30 minute call is enough: I draft the chapter from your own words, and nothing is used without your approval. Every chapter is credited to you by name, with a short bio. To express interest, comment or DM me by Monday 19 October with: 1. Your field 2. Your one-sentence answer to the question I'll review every reply and send the full brief to the people whose angle best fits the book.

Last week I shared the Main Street AI findings from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation and Ipsos. The headline: AI use is everywhere among small businesses, but building it into how the business actually runs is rare. This week I want to show you why closing that gap is about to matter more, and it's not the reason most people think. Two signals from September: On 9 September 2026, Mastercard launched Agent Connect for merchants building agentic commerce. On 10 September 2026, Visa, Mastercard and Ant International announced they've started building a shared "Know Your Agent" framework so payment networks can recognise and trust AI agents that buy on someone's behalf. Put simply: the card networks are preparing for AI agents to shop, book and pay. That means two kinds of agents will touch your business. There are the ones you run, and the ones your customers send. Most small business AI advice only covers the first kind. Here are three things to do this quarter that cover both: 1. Make your business readable to agents Prices, availability, opening hours, booking rules and refund policy should all be in plain text on your website, not buried in images or PDFs. An agent can't book what it can't read. 2. Integrate one workflow properly Don't add AI to ten things. Pick one workflow that's frequent, rule-based and easy to reverse, then build it end to end with a named owner and a log of what it did. That's the jump from "using AI" to "running on AI". Fahad's point this week is right too: not every automation needs AI. Start with the workflow, not the tool. 3. Decide your rules for agent customers now What can an agent book or buy without a human on your side? What needs a confirmation? How do you handle a refund request from an agent? Write it down before the first one arrives. My forecast, stated so it can be proved wrong: by the end of 2028, major small business surveys like Main Street AI will be asking how many customers buy through AI agents, not just how many owners use AI. If the 2028 edition doesn't ask, I was wrong.

follow these instructions to get started: ✅ Step 1: Go to the 'Classroom' section & open the 'Start Here' course. ✅ Step 2: Open the 'Start here' module & start watching. ✅ Step 3: Everything will be explained from there on! See y'all in the modules! Next Steps ➡️ - If you're brand new to AI & Claude, start with the new Cowork 101 Course 🦾 - If you're comfortable with Claude and looking for a setup that's a little more advanced, start with the AI Second Brain 2.0 Course 🔥 - If you're ready to create INSANELY valuable automations using AI to compltely transform businesses, go to the AI Automations Course (For Businesses) 💻💸 Work with me 🤝 - 🦾 If you're a business owner who'd like to hire me & my team of engineers to build automations/software/AI agents for you, go here: https://www.seven80labs.com/ - 👥 If you'd like my 1-1 consulting to help you learn how to implement AI in your business, book a demo call here: https://cal.com/1-1-ai-consulting - 👾 If you want to check out SGNL (the web app I'm developing w/ my team) you can try it out for free for 7-days here: https://www.sgnl.so/

On 17 June 2026 the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation and Ipsos published their first Main Street AI Monitor. It is a nationally representative survey of 1,070 people working in US small businesses. Here is what the AI users among them said they use it for: 64 per cent: personal productivity (drafting, summarising, brainstorming) 26 per cent: help with recurring tasks 6 per cent: automating workflows with minimal human involvement Six per cent. The Federal Reserve Banks found the same pattern from the owner's side. Their 2026 Report on Employer Firms, published 3 March 2026 from a survey of 6,525 firms, found that 46 per cent of small employer firms use AI. Among those users, about half are still experimenting, 44 per cent have partly integrated it and only 7 per cent have fully integrated it. The top challenge users named was accuracy, at 46 per cent. That is the signal. Almost anyone can now get access to AI. Very few businesses have actually built it into how they run. Most people in this community are either in that 6 to 7 per cent already or working hard to get there. What changes over the next ten years AI is moving from personal assistant to operator inside the business. So the question changes. It used to be "does the output look right?" It is becoming "who acted, were they allowed to and can we prove it?" You can see the infrastructure for that second world being built now. In September 2026 Visa, Mastercard and Ant International announced they will work together on a shared Know Your Agent framework, so that payment networks can identify and trust AI agents acting for businesses and customers. It is still a framework under development, not a live standard. But card networks do not build identity systems for things they expect to stay small. I trained as an auditor at PwC and KPMG, and that training shapes my read of where this is going. The next edge for small businesses will not come from having the cleverest automation. It will come from having automation you can trust with more responsibility. In any system, trust comes from three things auditors look for.