Syed Sohaib

Syed SohaibOct 23, 2026

Your AI agent just got a much cheaper way to make decisions. OpenAI made its Decisions API generally available on Oct 22 — a dedicated lane for the thousands of tiny calls an app or agent makes before doing real work: route this request, categorize that transaction, score this input, decide the next action. The pitch: decisions up to 10x faster than asking the same model through the regular chat API, with three output types — a probability, a choice from predefined options, or a score against a rubric. Inputs can be text, images, or structured data. Published pricing starts at $0.10 per million input tokens ($0.01 cached) — decision calls finally cost pennies, not dollars. My honest take: This is the infrastructure version of the "never-do list." Every AI agent needs a checkpoint that asks — is this inquiry hot, does this need a human, is this refund request legitimate — before the agent acts. Now that checkpoint runs in milliseconds at near-zero cost. Before, guardrails were a tax on the system. Now they're the cheapest part of it. If you're running any customer-facing AI, ask your vendor one question: where do the yes/no decisions get made — and what do they cost you? #AI #AIAgents #OpenAI #Developers #SME I share one useful AI insight a day here. Connect if you want them in your feed.

Syed SohaibOct 23, 2026

Google just built an AI that can see inside your business. This week Google launched a business landing page and new tools in the Gemini app for small business owners — rolling out globally over the coming days. The shift: connect your store, your accounting, your Google Business Profile, and Gemini can work with your real numbers instead of guessing. An AI that can see your inventory, your books, and your reviews is a fundamentally different tool from a chatbot in a text box. That's the whole bet: AI that operates inside your actual business. My honest take — and the caution I'd give before you connect anything: Plugging your accounting and store into an AI hub means handing it access to your financial records. Google's announcement doesn't spell out exactly how those business connections handle your data — so read the privacy terms before you hook anything up. Convenience is nice. Access to your money is serious. Start boring: connect one or two apps you use every day, ask it one real question about your business, and get one genuinely useful answer. Build from there — not from the feature list. When it arrives in your Gemini app this week, what's the first thing you'd ask it? #AI #Google #SmallBusiness #Gemini #SME If this space interests you, let's connect — I post practical AI breakdowns here every day.

Syed SohaibOct 23, 2026

Walmart just let AI agents go shopping. With a spending limit. This week, Walmart announced tools that let customers authorize AI agents to shop on their behalf — with spending limits and separate purchase records built in. Amazon, meanwhile, says PwC is using its Amazon Quick platform to put agents to work assessing technology investments and cutting sales teams' admin. Read both announcements together and the pattern is clear: 2026 is the year agents got PERMISSION. For two years the industry built agents that could act. This year it's building the permission layer around the acting: spending caps, separate records, human confirmation on the consequential stuff. My honest take for business owners: Your next customer might not be a person. It might be someone's agent, shopping with a budget and a checklist. Three things that make a business "agent-ready": 1. Structured product info — prices, specs, availability in machine-readable form. If an agent can't parse your offering, it recommends the competitor it can parse. 2. Clear policies in plain language — shipping, returns, pricing. Agents read policies literally. Ambiguity becomes someone else's sale. 3. A checkout that doesn't fight automation — guest checkout, clean APIs, no dark patterns. And audit your own cancellation flow too, because the customer's agent will find it. The permission question cuts both ways: you need rules for YOUR agent (the never-do list: no custom prices, no promised timelines, no refunds without a human), and you need to be legible to THEIR agent. Agents that act are the new baseline. The businesses designed for them win twice. Would you let an AI do your weekly shopping? #AIAgents #Ecommerce #Retail #Automation #SME Always happy to connect with people working in AI, tech, or digital growth — my door's open.