Listen to today’s podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/silk-logic-small-business-daily/id1841930957
Small Business Daily Podcast
Today’s podcast episode was created from the following stories:
5 acquisitions, winning over skeptical engineers, and spending tens of millions: Inside a public company’s ‘AI native’ push
By: Henry Chandonnet | Date: January 25, 2026
Amplitude has gone all-in on becoming “AI native,” acquiring five AI startups since late 2024, elevating AI leadership, and investing tens of millions of dollars—potentially over $100 million. A focused “AI week” and tools like Cursor and GitHub Copilot boosted internal adoption and reportedly lifted developer productivity around 40% (with some teams seeing several-hundred-percent gains), offering a playbook for changing skeptical engineering cultures. For operators, it’s a case study in pairing decisive M&A with bottoms-up enablement to accelerate ROI.
AI’s Business Revolution: What Happens to SaaS, OpenAI, and Microsoft?
By: Brian Wang | Date: January 24, 2026
Satya Nadella frames AI like the database market: models will proliferate and commoditize, while value shifts to orchestration, agents, and applications infused with firm-specific knowledge. Microsoft is leaning into multi-model systems and AI-enabled workflows, citing revenue growth with flat headcount as evidence of productivity gains. Expect enterprise adoption to move both top-down (clear ROI use cases) and bottom-up (employees building agents to remove drudgery).
I’m a co-creator of Alexa. Writing a 6-page memo helped me decide to quit Amazon and launch my own AI startup.
By: William Tunstall-Pedoe (as told to Joshua Nelken-Zitser) | Date: January 25, 2026
After helping launch Alexa, William Tunstall-Pedoe used Amazon’s six-page memo format to clarify a major career pivot: leaving to return to startup building. He argues startups are better suited for contrarian bets and speed, later founding UnlikelyAI to pursue trustworthy, neurosymbolic AI. The takeaway for founders and leaders: structured thinking tools can illuminate when agility and focus matter more than scale.
Local Masonry Video Player
By: Not specified | Date: Not specified
An open-source Windows app for managing large libraries of videos—especially AI-generated content—offers a masonry grid, folder-based indexing, and FFmpeg-powered metadata search (including prompts) with an experimental mobile connect feature. Security-conscious users should review the source and note that advanced playback and normalization require installing FFmpeg. For content teams and creators, it’s a lightweight, local-first alternative to cloud libraries.
How Small Businesses Win With Digital Marketing
By: Masud Karim | Date: January 25, 2026
The piece emphasizes strategy over spend: local SEO and Google Business Profiles, helpful content, right-fit social channels, and email can deliver measurable ROI on modest budgets. It urges teams to track conversions and ROI, run A/B tests, and scale only after consistent results. Start small, stay consistent, and let data—not guesses—guide the next investment.
America’s AI Strategy: Infrastructure, Regulation, and Global Competition
By: Brian Wang | Date: January 24, 2026
This analysis argues current AI infrastructure buildout is meeting real demand and advocates a light, federal-first regulatory approach to avoid costly 50-state patchworks. It frames U.S. competitiveness around diffusion and export of the domestic tech stack, while encouraging energy innovations like behind-the-meter power to support data centers. For businesses, the policy landscape will influence compute access, costs, and the speed of AI adoption.
DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis reveals why Google is not worried about AI bubble
By: Not specified | Date: January 25, 2026
Demis Hassabis says AI demand is surging and far from a broad bubble, though pockets of overheated early-stage funding may see corrections; chip shortages remain a key bottleneck. DeepMind is focused on execution and feels cushioned by Alphabet’s core businesses while it pushes AI-native products like Gemini. Operators should expect strong fundamentals tempered by supply constraints and valuation resets in some corners of the market.
