Listen to today’s podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/silk-logic-small-business-daily/id1841930957
Small Business Daily Podcast — January 10, 2026
Today’s podcast episode was created from the following stories:
How to strengthen support with customer service automation
Author: John Paul Hernandez | Date: January 9, 2026
Source: sproutsocial.com
As customer expectations rise, automation is becoming essential to deliver fast, personalized support across channels. The piece outlines practical wins—like chatbots, automated routing, and proactive outreach—that cut costs, ease agent burnout, and lift CSAT, plus a roadmap to implement and measure KPIs. For small teams, it’s a playbook to scale service without losing the human touch.
Snowflake to acquire AI observability startup Observe
Author: Anwesha Pattanaik | Date: January 9, 2026
Source: verdict.co.uk
Snowflake plans to fold Observe’s AI-powered observability into its AI Data Cloud, unifying logs, metrics, and traces on open standards like OpenTelemetry and Apache Iceberg. The goal: proactive, automated troubleshooting at scale while lowering the cost of retaining telemetry data. For businesses building AI apps, this promises faster root-cause analysis and more reliable operations.
$14 billion AI startup Mistral — Europe’s answer to OpenAI — lands French military deal as the region bets on homegrown tech
Author: Thibault Spirlet | Date: January 9, 2026
Source: businessinsider.com
Mistral secured a framework agreement with France’s Ministry of the Armed Forces to deploy its models on sovereign, French-controlled infrastructure. The deal bolsters Europe’s push for technological and data sovereignty while positioning Mistral as a leading regional alternative to U.S. AI giants. It signals expanding public-sector opportunities for AI vendors with strong compliance and on-prem capabilities.
China is employing armies of human ‘cyber laborers’ to train humanoid robots
Author: Mike Wheatley | Date: January 8, 2026
Source: siliconangle.com
China is scaling government-backed “robot training centers” where workers in VR and exoskeletons generate fine-grained motion datasets for embodied AI. The effort underscores a bet that large, high-quality, human-collected data can accelerate humanoid capabilities, though experts question the speed and cost-efficiency versus synthetic data. For global robotics, it highlights an intensifying race to secure training data sources.
Meta RayBan just got embarrassed by a Kickstarter project – the L’Atitude 52°N
Author: Alexander Maxham | Date: January 8, 2026
Source: androidheadlines.com
The L’Atitude 52°N smart glasses, built by former OnePlus engineers, tout notably better camera performance—especially at night—than Meta’s Ray-Ban Gen 2, along with on-device AI features like translation via Google Gemini. With strong Kickstarter traction and multiple styles, they hint at a new wave of creator-friendly wearables. For marketers and creators, that means more hands-free, high-quality capture in the field.
Kunlunmeta partners with AMD to shine at CES
Author: Not specified | Date: January 9, 2026
Source: kunlunmeta.net
KunlunMeta debuted a “GPT-Station AI Super Mobile Terminal” with AMD’s Ryzen AI, promising a local, multi-agent “portable team” for tasks like research, coding, and content creation—no cloud needed. The company pitches edge-centric privacy, efficiency gains from its custom engine, and long-context model claims. If it delivers, mobile professionals could tap powerful AI workflows securely on the go.
