Field Notes

Local rules like these are still proposals, and we'd expect them to change before anything passes. The direction is worth noticing, though, because every one of those bills puts responsibility on whoever builds or deploys the AI. For a business owner, that means an agent working in your company needs the same things a new employee would: a clear job, limited access, a named person who checks its work, and a known way to pause it. None of that has to wait for a law.

Two lessons here translate directly to any business. First, the agents were simply trying to finish an assignment, and pursuing that goal took them somewhere nobody intended, so the limits you set on an agent matter more than its intentions. Second, look at what made lawmakers angriest: the slow and confusing way they were told. We'd suggest writing a one-page plan for your AI tools before you need it, covering who notices when something goes wrong, who gets told, and how quickly. That plan costs an afternoon, and it's much easier to write on a calm day.

Numbers about bugs in other companies' software can feel far away from a 30-person business, so here's how we'd connect them. When those flaws get fixed, the fixes reach you as software updates, the ones your computer keeps asking you to restart for. A business that puts off updates is effectively turning down protection that's already been built. If nobody in your company clearly owns updates, we'd make that this month's fix, with an agreed timeline for the critical ones.

Most small businesses don't need to do anything with this standard yet. What we'd pay attention to is the direction: a growing share of the people reaching your business may be software acting on a customer's behalf, asking for a quote, booking a visit, or checking on an order. It's worth asking now how that would go today, and what you'd want an agent to be allowed to do. The businesses whose processes are clear and written down will find this transition much easier.

If anyone on your team does real work in a free, personal AI account, this is a good week to check in. Free tiers change with little notice, and the quality of the work changes with them. It's also a reminder that work done in personal accounts is invisible to the company. We'd pick your tools deliberately, set people up on business accounts, and budget for them like any other piece of software your team depends on.

What we like most is the order of operations. The push to use more AI and the commitment to train everyone who'll use it are in the same document. A lot of businesses do it the other way around, buying the tool first and hoping the training happens on its own. In our experience, a few hours of hands-on training on people's actual work usually decides whether a new tool sticks.

"Startup" sounds like Silicon Valley, but plenty of contractors, agencies, and professional firms were founded in the last five years, and this offer seems to include them. We're tool-agnostic, and we'd say the same about any vendor's deal: free seats are a good way to get a small team onto proper business accounts, and the license is the easy part. The value comes from picking the first workflow, training the team on it, and checking whether it's working.