AI Automations for Business

Katie Tovey-Grindlay and Noel Tovey-Grindlay
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AI Automations for Business is about making AI Simple, Fun & Accessible AI automation is transforming the way we run businesses but staying up to date and knowing how to use it effectively can feel overwhelming. That’s where we come in. Join hosts Katie and Noel every week for a relaxed, no-jargon conversation about AI and automation for business.  We break down the latest updates, debunk myths, and make AI accessible, even if you're not tech-savvy. If you’re a business owner looking to save time, streamline workflows, and stay ahead of the curve with AI, this podcast is for you. You can also check out our Skool community, where we help you on your automation journey and show you the automations we talk about in action. You can check this out at: https://skool.com/ai-business-club

  1. 2d ago

    S2. Ep38 - 5 AI Automation Mistakes That Could Cost Your Business (And How to Avoid Them)

    AI and automation can transform a small business. Done badly, they can cost you money, expose your data, or land you in legal trouble. Noel shares the five pitfalls he sees most often, and the ones with the biggest impact on the businesses that fall into them. Buying the solution before you understand the problem (and why that "million pound AI funnel" on Instagram won't work for a business with 500 followers). Paying someone to build automations you don't actually own, so they all switch off the day you stop paying. Pasting sensitive information into tools without knowing where your data really goes, including the rise of AI note takers on calls. Setting up a chatbot and leaving it to decay, with the Air Canada court case as a reminder that whatever your chatbot says, your business said. And believing the hype, from fake Stripe dashboards to faked AI demos. Katie adds the view from the other side of the screen: why she holds back on calls full of note takers, and why she's never had an app idea approved by Noel (or by Claude). Plus Anthropic's Sonnet 5.5, released the day before OpenAI's Dev Day, Meta's new Muse agent and smart glasses, and the announcement of new courses coming to makeautomations.ai, starting with the planning process behind pitfall number one. Get access to Lucy's AI legal toolkit Click here to find out more *We loved Lucy’s AI Legal Tool kit so much we have become affiliates for it. When you click on our link we earn a small percentage at no additional cost to you.  Send us Fan Mail How to find us: We have a free LinkedIn group (AI Automations For Business), the group is open to all. Interested in learning WebMCP check out webmcp.academy Check out Clyde, our multi-agent AI platform that connects to 1000+ apps and lets you build powerful automations without the complexity. Join the free Clyde Skool community to learn how to get the most out of it, share workflows, and connect with other builders putting AI to work in their businesses. New for 2026, you can also find us on Substack, click here to subscribe and get all the latest news and updates from us. If you would like dedicated help with your automations or would like us to build them for you then you can find our agency at makeautomations.ai Or you can contact us via email at hello@makeautomations.ai.

  2. Sep 24

    S2. Ep37 - Can You Really Build an App in a Day? We're Calling BS

    The ads are everywhere. Come up with an app idea, build it, and launch it, all in a single day. Katie's seen them across every platform and now they've made it into her inbox too, and she's calling BS. So she put it to Noel, who's been building apps for himself and for clients for years. His answer starts as a yes and no, and becomes a flat no the moment Katie clarifies these are customer-facing apps being pitched to solo service business owners. The rest of the episode is what those ads leave out. The requirements work that has to happen before you write a line of code, why security gets treated as an afterthought and shouldn't be, what happens when 200 people use your app at once, and the tool stack Noel actually uses (Claude Code, Supabase, Vercel and Railway) with real monthly costs attached. He's honest about the upside too: the cost moat around app building has genuinely collapsed, and a minimum viable product in a week is now realistic. Just not in a day, and not for your customers. Plus a very busy week of model releases that rather undermines last week's AI slowdown episode, and a new model called Jev that isn't for chatting at all, which Noel has already used to cut his token usage by over 90%. Send us Fan Mail How to find us: We have a free LinkedIn group (AI Automations For Business), the group is open to all. Interested in learning WebMCP check out webmcp.academy Check out Clyde, our multi-agent AI platform that connects to 1000+ apps and lets you build powerful automations without the complexity. Join the free Clyde Skool community to learn how to get the most out of it, share workflows, and connect with other builders putting AI to work in their businesses. New for 2026, you can also find us on Substack, click here to subscribe and get all the latest news and updates from us. If you would like dedicated help with your automations or would like us to build them for you then you can find our agency at makeautomations.ai Or you can contact us via email at hello@makeautomations.ai.

  3. Sep 17

    S2. Ep36 - The AI Labs Are Hitting the Brakes — And It Won't Affect Your Business At All

    Every major AI lab in America has agreed they should slow down frontier development. Even Musk's xAI signed up to it. Sounds like a big deal, and for the labs it is. But Noel's take is that for the vast majority of business owners, it changes precisely nothing. The agents most of us are running aren't operating anywhere near the pinnacle of what AI can do. They're writing content, reviewing documents and handling repetitive work, and none of that is affected by OpenAI taking longer between releases. What the slowdown does give you is a breather. Noel and Katie talk about using it to take stock instead of chasing the next shiny model, including a future-proofing question worth asking about every model your business currently depends on. They also get into why "I'm only using the basics" is nothing to feel bad about, whether AI prices go up or down from here, and how AI is quietly creeping into everything anyway (yes, including the Alexa in the kitchen of everyone complaining about AI online). Plus DeepSeek's surprise return with a model at a fraction of the price of the frontier options, OpenAI's new image model and the inevitable 80s trend, and a new group chat feature coming to Clyde. Send us Fan Mail How to find us: We have a free LinkedIn group (AI Automations For Business), the group is open to all. Interested in learning WebMCP check out webmcp.academy Check out Clyde, our multi-agent AI platform that connects to 1000+ apps and lets you build powerful automations without the complexity. Join the free Clyde Skool community to learn how to get the most out of it, share workflows, and connect with other builders putting AI to work in their businesses. New for 2026, you can also find us on Substack, click here to subscribe and get all the latest news and updates from us. If you would like dedicated help with your automations or would like us to build them for you then you can find our agency at makeautomations.ai Or you can contact us via email at hello@makeautomations.ai.

  4. Sep 10

    S2. Ep35 - Generic In, Generic Out: The Real Reason AI Content Doesn't Work For You

    If your AI content sounds generic, it's because you're feeding it generic input. Katie gets on her soapbox this week about the "1000 viral hooks" and "500 content prompts" downloads flooding everyone's feeds, and why they'll never work: they were written by AI in the first place, thousands of other people have the same file, and the moment you feed them into your LLM it starts writing like someone else instead of you. Instead, she walks through where your content ideas should actually come from. The questions clients ask, the comments, the DMs, the things people are stuck on. Noel shares a real client result live on the episode and Katie turns it into multiple pieces of content in real time, showing how one story becomes a how-to, a result post and a storytelling post. Plus practical advice on writing storytelling content when it doesn't come naturally. They also tackle the AI poster problem (that identical format now on every Facebook group and LinkedIn feed), and Noel shares his top tip for generating on-brand graphics using HTML instead of AI images, which is faster, cheaper and far easier to edit. Plus the week's model news: Gemini 3.8 Flash, Fable 5.1 as the first model carrying Anthropic's text watermark, and OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra. Send us Fan Mail How to find us: We have a free LinkedIn group (AI Automations For Business), the group is open to all. Interested in learning WebMCP check out webmcp.academy Check out Clyde, our multi-agent AI platform that connects to 1000+ apps and lets you build powerful automations without the complexity. Join the free Clyde Skool community to learn how to get the most out of it, share workflows, and connect with other builders putting AI to work in their businesses. New for 2026, you can also find us on Substack, click here to subscribe and get all the latest news and updates from us. If you would like dedicated help with your automations or would like us to build them for you then you can find our agency at makeautomations.ai Or you can contact us via email at hello@makeautomations.ai.

  5. Sep 3

    S2. Ep34 - WebMCP: Get Your Website Agent-Ready Before Your Competitors Even Know It Exists

    Right now, over 90% of websites have no way for an AI agent to actually use them. That's about to become a problem. In this episode, Noel explains WebMCP: a way of exposing tools on your own website so AI agents can search, filter, book and buy directly, instead of scraping your page code and guessing. He compares it to the moment the iPhone launched and everyone scrambled to make their sites responsive, and backs it up with his own test: the same task took computer use over two minutes, and WebMCP five seconds. They cover who needs it (not just e-commerce), how service businesses and coaches can use it for FAQs, courses and sales pages, what actually has to change on your site (less than you'd think, no redesign needed), why WordPress is the awkward one, and whether any of this affects your AI search visibility today. Plus, Noel's new WebMCP Academy, the free tool that checks any URL for WebMCP tools, Make.com finally adding subfolders and labels, OpenClaw 2.0, and the Chinese micro dramas that are now 95% AI generated. Send us Fan Mail How to find us: We have a free LinkedIn group (AI Automations For Business), the group is open to all. Interested in learning WebMCP check out webmcp.academy Check out Clyde, our multi-agent AI platform that connects to 1000+ apps and lets you build powerful automations without the complexity. Join the free Clyde Skool community to learn how to get the most out of it, share workflows, and connect with other builders putting AI to work in their businesses. New for 2026, you can also find us on Substack, click here to subscribe and get all the latest news and updates from us. If you would like dedicated help with your automations or would like us to build them for you then you can find our agency at makeautomations.ai Or you can contact us via email at hello@makeautomations.ai.

  6. Aug 27

    S2. Ep33 - Which AI Agent Is Right for You? A Beginner to Expert Breakdown

    There's nothing more frustrating than getting excited about an AI agent, only to find it's either way above your technical level or far too basic to do what you need. In this episode, Noel breaks the agent landscape into three tiers and matches each one to a skill level. Agent systems like Cowork and ChatGPT Work are the beginner starting point, already included in your subscription, but they carry a risk most people haven't considered. Agent builders like Clyde, Grokbot, Make.com, Zapier and n8n sit in the intermediate space, and Noel explains why the $200 a month entry price on Grokbot is a hard sell for a business owner. Then there's self-hosting with OpenClaw and Hermes, which is expert territory and comes with a serious warning about file access. He also covers what to check before committing to any of them: which AI models you're locked into, and how quickly you'll hit usage limits. Plus, the mystery of Ox Alpha, a stealth-released model giving away trillions of free tokens, and Noel's theory about which lab is behind it. Send us Fan Mail How to find us: We have a free LinkedIn group (AI Automations For Business), the group is open to all. Interested in learning WebMCP check out webmcp.academy Check out Clyde, our multi-agent AI platform that connects to 1000+ apps and lets you build powerful automations without the complexity. Join the free Clyde Skool community to learn how to get the most out of it, share workflows, and connect with other builders putting AI to work in their businesses. New for 2026, you can also find us on Substack, click here to subscribe and get all the latest news and updates from us. If you would like dedicated help with your automations or would like us to build them for you then you can find our agency at makeautomations.ai Or you can contact us via email at hello@makeautomations.ai.

  7. Aug 20

    S2. Ep32 - Anthropic Is Watermarking AI Text — And You Can't Strip It Out

    There's a lot of misinformation flying around about Anthropic's new AI watermarking, so Noel breaks down what it actually is. It isn't hidden code you can delete. The watermark is the words themselves and the statistical order they come out in, which means copying your text into a Google Doc and pasting it elsewhere won't shake it off. Noel explains how it works, why it's driven by EU law, which models it applies to and when, the API Anthropic is about to release so anyone can check whether text came from Claude, and what happened when he asked Claude to help him strip it out. Also in a packed news episode: Make.com finally released Maia, their AI assistant that builds your automations and teaches you as it goes (free for 30 days, and yes, there's dark mode). Stripe bought OpenRouter for $7 billion. And Higgsfield spent $2 million making a feature length AI film you can watch on a Netflix-style page. You can check out all the AI films on Higgsfield here: https://higgsfield.ai/original-series Send us Fan Mail How to find us: We have a free LinkedIn group (AI Automations For Business), the group is open to all. Interested in learning WebMCP check out webmcp.academy Check out Clyde, our multi-agent AI platform that connects to 1000+ apps and lets you build powerful automations without the complexity. Join the free Clyde Skool community to learn how to get the most out of it, share workflows, and connect with other builders putting AI to work in their businesses. New for 2026, you can also find us on Substack, click here to subscribe and get all the latest news and updates from us. If you would like dedicated help with your automations or would like us to build them for you then you can find our agency at makeautomations.ai Or you can contact us via email at hello@makeautomations.ai.

  8. Aug 13

    S2. Ep31 - When to Upgrade from a Free AI Account (And When Not to Bother)

    Do you actually need to pay for ChatGPT or Claude? A listener asked when it's time to stop using a free account and upgrade, so Noel and Katie go through both platforms feature by feature. What you get free on ChatGPT (which is more generous than most people realise), what Claude holds back on its free tier including projects, extended research and the ability to top up your usage, and which models you're limited to on each. They also compare the business and team plans, per-seat pricing, and why the "unlimited" chats on ChatGPT come with an asterisk. The honest conclusion: free works fine for light occasional use, and ChatGPT's free account is the better one to test drive. But if AI is part of your daily workflow, or you want Cowork and Claude Code, the subscription pays for itself. Plus the week's news: Anthropic scrapping the planned Sonnet 5 price rise, and Seedance 2.5 bringing 30 second AI video with proper camera control. Send us Fan Mail How to find us: We have a free LinkedIn group (AI Automations For Business), the group is open to all. Interested in learning WebMCP check out webmcp.academy Check out Clyde, our multi-agent AI platform that connects to 1000+ apps and lets you build powerful automations without the complexity. Join the free Clyde Skool community to learn how to get the most out of it, share workflows, and connect with other builders putting AI to work in their businesses. New for 2026, you can also find us on Substack, click here to subscribe and get all the latest news and updates from us. If you would like dedicated help with your automations or would like us to build them for you then you can find our agency at makeautomations.ai Or you can contact us via email at hello@makeautomations.ai.

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About

AI Automations for Business is about making AI Simple, Fun & Accessible AI automation is transforming the way we run businesses but staying up to date and knowing how to use it effectively can feel overwhelming. That’s where we come in. Join hosts Katie and Noel every week for a relaxed, no-jargon conversation about AI and automation for business.  We break down the latest updates, debunk myths, and make AI accessible, even if you're not tech-savvy. If you’re a business owner looking to save time, streamline workflows, and stay ahead of the curve with AI, this podcast is for you. You can also check out our Skool community, where we help you on your automation journey and show you the automations we talk about in action. You can check this out at: https://skool.com/ai-business-club

Information

  • Creator
    Katie Tovey-Grindlay and Noel Tovey-Grindlay
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    80
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 AI Automations for Business
  • Show Website
    AI Automations for Business

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