S1. Ep40 - What Do Anthropic and Google's New AI Models Mean for Your Business
Wondering what Anthropic and Google's latest AI releases actually mean for your small business? You're not alone. In this episode, Katie and Noel break down the major updates from both tech giants, including Anthropic's Opus 4.5 (now 66% cheaper) and Google's Gemini 3 with its improved multimodal capabilities and deeper reasoning.
They reveal why Opus 4.5 excels at agentic tool use for automations, how Gemini 3's integration into Google Docs and Sheets could change your workflow, and how you can try most of these new features completely FREE!
Perfect for service-based business owners, solopreneurs, and small teams ready to move beyond using AI for just content creation and start treating it as a genuine business apprentice.
How to find us:
Join our membership over on Skool, where we support you on your AI and automation journey. We share exclusive content in the membership that shows you the automations we talks about in action how to build them. Find out more about the AI Business Club here.
We have a free LinkedIn group (AI Automations For Business), the group is open to all.
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
-
Katie (00:26)
Hello and welcome back to another episode. Hi, hello, I'm Katie and as always I've got Noel here with me. Hi Noel.
Noel (00:35)
Hello. Yeah, looking forward to getting into this one. It's been an incredibly busy week in the AI world.
Katie (00:41)
I feel like you're very excited about this one because we're going to be talking about the new AI upgrades and how they matter for small service-based business owners. But I feel like you've been quite impressed by all of the upgrades.
Noel (01:03)
Yeah, it's been crazy. So you know, one week someone releases the cleverest model available, you know, the smartest out of them. And then within a week someone else goes, well, I've got one that does a bit better on this. There's also our flagship. So yeah, it's been a bit of a to and fro.
Katie (01:20)
Yeah. So who did the update first, Anthropic or Google?
Noel (01:32)
So Google, they were the first ones. That was last week for us recording it, but they released Gemini 3 and at the time it was miles and miles ahead of anyone else on all kinds of benchmarks. You know, whenever a new model is released, they love a benchmark and a graph.
Katie (01:53)
Yeah, and then Anthropic kind of just went, hold my beer.
Noel (01:58)
A little bit, yeah. I don't think they quite beat Gemini on every use case. I think reading Anthropic's release notes and all that sort of stuff, they were kind of cherry picking the ones where they were really good. I don't think it fully covered everything. Whereas Gemini and Google, they were so excited they just showed everything almost. Yeah.
Katie (02:13)
Okay. Well, let's go through some of the upgrades and then what we want to do is obviously we don't just want to tell people about the upgrades, which is great. It's nice, but we also then want to share with you how this actually impacts your business, how it helps your business. So we'll be talking about that once we've gone through just some of the upgrades. So, Noel, do you want to start with the Anthropic updates first?
Noel (03:00)
Yeah, so their update is they released Opus 4.5. So if you're unfamiliar with the model levels with Anthropic, Opus is like their top tier. It's like the best of the best. And then they go down to Sonnet and then Haiku. So Opus 4 was the best one. And now they've upgraded that to 4.5. So yeah, it's really, really clever. It's got loads of, it's really good for things like coding. And I always find that Anthropic has always been good at coding. So I use Claude Code quite a bit to do some bits and stuff and build some internal apps. And yeah, I'm looking forward to giving Opus 4.5 a go and just seeing how good that is because Sonnet 4.5 is brilliant. It just gets on and does a good job. It's a very good employee.
Katie (03:54)
Okay.
Noel (03:59)
Yes, I'll do that.
Katie (04:00)
Well done, employee of the month. It's also 66% cheaper as well than previous Opus models, isn't it?
Noel (04:08)
It is. Yeah, that's on the API. Yeah. So that's really, really good.
Katie (04:11)
Why do you think that is? Why do you think they've gone with that?
Noel (04:18)
I think it's kind of a general trend. So Gemini, most of their stuff currently, so all the Gemini 3 stuff, you can pretty much have a go with it for free. So although it's like incredibly clever and super powered and all that sort of stuff, you can just go into Google AI Studio and then just play with everything for no cost. So, and I also...
Katie (04:43)
So do you think Anthropic are trying to keep up then with Google or like to kind of break the barrier a bit to make it more accessible to people?
Noel (04:55)
I think so. It's kind of, yeah, I think it's part of that and also, you know, the infrastructure is now there. It's getting better. It's probably getting cheaper because OpenAI models as well, you know, they've also been trending slightly down in terms of cost. So I think as we're going forward, I think we'll hit a point where it can't get any cheaper, obviously, but for now it's trending down.
Katie (05:20)
Yeah. Other than free.
Noel (05:24)
To like a more sensible level. So yeah, they all seem to kind of like just try and give as much away as they can. I mean, Google, I don't see how they're making any money with some of their releases, but obviously they make so much money elsewhere in the business that they can afford to give free access to things.
Katie (05:26)
Yeah. I think that's the thing when these giant companies are doing things like this LLM, they kind of have such an advantage over a lot of the smaller companies, because they're so well established, you know, they've got huge teams globally.
Noel (06:08)
Mm. Yeah.
Katie (06:18)
So I feel like actually to then let people use this for free is a very easy concept for them, it's easy for them to let that happen. Whereas some of the others, they need as many paid users as possible.
Noel (06:32)
Yeah. Yeah, it gives them great exposure as well. I mean, I don't have an X account, but I'm sure every time they release stuff it's full of people trying it out and showing what it can do and all that sort of stuff. So yeah.
Katie (06:55)
Yeah, Google were always really active on X back in the day when I was. So yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if they still are, or even if they're now probably active on Threads as well.
Noel (07:03)
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. The other thing, going back to the Opus 4.5 model, it's also a lot better at agentic tool use. You might be thinking, well, what does that mean? But when we give an AI agent a job within our automation, we can assign it all kinds of different tools so it can access your calendars, it could access CRMs and all kinds of stuff.
Katie (07:30)
Yeah.
Noel (07:45)
One thing I'd always note with Anthropic models is their tool usage is usually spot on. Even with a really rubbish system prompt within the agent, it seems to always figure things out and do things better than what other models like OpenAI can do. So yeah, with 4.5, it's even better. I'm not sure how it could have got better, to be honest, but I think we built one in the Skool community which has a really, really basic system prompt for a task list. And yeah, the Anthropic agent just nailed it first time. Yeah, whereas you put OpenAI in there, it was like, maybe I'll use that tool, maybe I won't. So yeah, it's a big upgrade.
Katie (08:32)
Mm. Okay, so any other Anthropic upgrades that we need to be aware of?
Noel (08:45)
So they've also talked about enterprise safety. I did read the press release, it's a bit woolly as to what they mean by that. You know, I'm guessing they're making things a bit more strict on the security and compliance side, which is always good. Yeah. And they also released a little side product as well. So if you're on the Max plan, you also have a Chrome extension which will control your browser. So it's a bit like where we talked a few episodes ago about Atlas and AI browsers and things. So this one plugs straight into Google Chrome and things like that and it can go off and, you know, apparently they say it can use CRMs and Slack to do tasks and things. But yeah, I'm a bit worried about that when I relate to it.
Katie (09:41)
Yeah, you don't feel very confident letting it run around in your CRM, do you, Noel?
Noel (09:47)
No, no, no, no, definitely not. I would say like normal automations, you know, that's still king when it comes to doing stuff for the CRM. I would still like to be clicking those buttons and then the magic happens rather than AI clicking the wrong button and then the magic happens somewhere else where it shouldn't have done.
Katie (10:03)
Yeah. Yeah, I feel like you've got trust issues with Anthropic Opus 4.5, Noel.
Noel (10:15)
Just AI browsers in general really when it comes to controlling.
Katie (10:17)
Okay, okay, so it's nothing personal against Opus 4.5. Okay, well, that's fine.
Noel (10:25)
No, definitely not. I mean, until it comes to Christmas shopping, you can go off and do that. That's fine.
Katie (10:34)
Well, we're recording this on the 26th of November. So you've got about 28 days before you start yours.
Noel (10:39)
Yeah, for us to the agent, yes.
Katie (10:48)
Yeah, to start your Christmas shopping. Yeah. And there's me like panicking because I haven't finished mine yet.
Noel (10:51)
Yeah, plenty of time, plenty of time. Yeah, very true. It's the same every year. You know what you're getting into.
Katie (11:08)
Okay, so let's talk about Google and Gemini 3.
Noel (11:12)
Yes, so this is an incredibly clever model. Again, they talk about agentic tool use and things like that, how things have all improved when it comes to controlling agents, which is great. For me, I've never really used a Gemini model in an agent yet, so I'm probably going to give it a go and see how that measures up because usually I get on so well with Anthropic models, I don't really have a look at anyone else. I think on this occasion I'll give it a go.
Katie (11:46)
I find Gemini when you are asking it questions, it's very hit and miss on the accuracy. Obviously I haven't used Gemini 3 yet, but I do find it's very hit and miss if it's going to tell me the truth or make something up.
Noel (11:53)
Yeah. Struggles with the hallucinations, definitely. But I think with 3, I would say I've had a quick go with it. I'd say it's better than 2.5. I mean, I would expect it to be better. But I'm pretty sure there was a hallucinations benchmark that they showed in some sort of bar chart or scatter graph or whatever. Yeah, so they showed that it was doing a lot better than it used to and that sort of stuff. But yeah, it's always been an issue. But yeah, now we can obviously have access to Gemini 3. Obviously, if you use Gmail or you're heavily invested into the Google apps and all that sort of stuff, that's...
Katie (12:31)
Yeah, like Docs and Sheets and stuff like that, don't you? Yeah.
Noel (13:10)
Sheets and yeah, and all that sort of good stuff. Yeah, Gemini 3 is now embedded into those tools as well. Yeah, it's a hell of a lot smarter than the previous model. So yeah, it should in theory be a lot better.
Katie (13:17)
Which is really cool. Yeah. But I'm really excited about that integration into, you know, well, especially like Google Docs. I feel like that's a bit of a game changer.
Noel (13:33)
Definitely. And also with Gemini 3, it's kind of more multimodal than the other models. So it can read documents, you know, it can go off and understand videos and audio and even images and things like that. So it can understand all of that and bring that into its context. So, you know, that's actually really, really good. And I also find actually Gemini 2.5 is also really good at some of those bits as well. Yeah, it seems to have got a lot better. If you're kind of on the visual side and you say, well, here's an image, help me describe it so I can create something, you know, it will understand it a hell of a lot better, which is really, really cool. But yeah, the other big thing, obviously, they've got a different reasoning sort of model. So they call it deeper reasoning. So if you ask it a harder question, it will dynamically think about it for longer and things like that to give you the better response, which is pretty awesome.
Katie (14:40)
Yeah. Okay. Is that where you're getting all your jokes from these days?
Noel (14:47)
Yeah. If you ask it for a simple joke, it's going to take two seconds. Yeah, all my cracker jokes. It's also with these models, they're a lot better at building user interfaces as well on the coding side. So if you've ever coded a website or an app on things like Lovable or anything else like that, or maybe you've used OpenAI Codex or whatever, you'll find that they all kind of look the same because they're using the same libraries for the different parts kind of thing. So for me, it's very easy to spot when somebody's used AI to create a website. But now with Gemini, it's a lot better and I've been building an app recently and I created it with 2.5. It looked terrible. And then as soon as Gemini 3 came out, I thought, hold on, let's give it a go. Let's see what happens. And then it completely redid the UI and it looked brilliant. You know, whereas the other one looked really vanilla, really basic. Although it worked, which was great. It just didn't look amazing. But yeah, now it's a lot better.
Katie (15:58)
Can I ask what are the telltale signs of an AI generated website?
Noel (16:13)
So it's kind of hard to describe, I guess, but they always seem to... Yeah, they use, most of them use a UI library called Shadcn and basically they all use the same components and it all looks very, very similar. So most people's hero images look the same and then what it always does after a hero image is put six cards underneath and those six cards always look the same sort of style on different websites.
Katie (16:49)
Got you, so it's kind of a bit like when ChatGPT spits out a caption for you, it will always follow the same format.
Noel (16:56)
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was very good. I mean, it is functional and it works very well, but yeah, if you want a bit of flair, it's not going to do it.
Katie (17:01)
Yeah, it's just like the exact same thing as a ChatGPT caption. Like it's there. It works, but if you want a bit of flair, then you need to tweak it a bit.
Noel (17:11)
Yeah, definitely. There's also been another, well they aren't Gemini 3 or they kind of are. But there's been two other product releases last week as well. So Imagen 3 Pro came out, which is their image model. And yeah, that's a lot better than what it used to be, which I mean, not that it was bad, but...
Katie (17:25)
Woohoo! Yes. I have seen someone who generated an image, they shared it in a Facebook group. So the prompt was, I mean, I'm probably going to butcher it a bit, but it was create an image of a coffee cup with my business logo on in a cafe. Oh my goodness. It was so good. Like so good. Yeah, you could obviously tell it was AI, but it looked so good. It was like, it actually looked crisp rather than, you know, how some of the AI images tend to look. And it looked really realistic.
Noel (18:39)
Yeah, they kind of lose a bit of sharpness, don't they?
Katie (18:50)
Yeah, I'm excited to play around with that.
Noel (18:51)
Yeah, I haven't had much time to have that much of a deep dive with it, but the image editing in there as well has also improved. Yeah, if you're like switching things around or adding people in, it's also a lot better, which is pretty awesome. And I guess the final product that they released was a tool called Jules, which helps you code with AI. Now, I would say it's pretty good. I've had a go with it already. But what it does is you can ask it to build something or code something or to edit something that already exists or whatever. And then with the new agent superpowers it has these days, it then creates itself a little to-do list. So it's like, right, well, to get to this end goal, I need to do all of these different jobs. And it goes through them one by one and ticks them off. Which is really, really handy, but in my experience using the tool so far is, yes, it's great that it does that to-do list and checklist, but sometimes it can forget the context of what you're trying to do. So I was trying to get it to build an iOS app and I had a bare bones structure of an Xcode project. In six months time it's going to be incredible, I have no doubt, but yeah, right now it's a bit not sure.
Katie (20:43)
Yeah. Some tweaking still needs to go on. Yeah. As always, I think with most of the things that get released, I think they just put them out when they think it's good and not when it's great, which I think is actually a clever thing to do.
Noel (20:51)
Definitely, yes. Yeah. Yeah, definitely, yeah. So yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes.
Katie (21:12)
Yeah. So what do all of these upgrades mean for service-based business owners? Well, AI kind of stops being just a tool and it becomes part of your business. It's becoming your apprentice or your junior employee. How are you viewing it with all of these upgrades?
Noel (21:42)
Yeah, definitely. It's moving more into the apprentice role, isn't it? Within your business, I think.
Katie (21:48)
Yeah. And I think it's moved on so much more and there are still business owners out there that think AI is just a content creation tool. And we're so advanced from that now. It just doesn't come up with things that you can do for your business, but it actually does these tasks for you. Yeah, so it is like the admin tasks, it's the research, it's going into your inbox, it's multi-step workflows happening without you having to watch over it or be involved. But yeah, like you say, I think it is very much like an apprentice now or like a junior employee. And I think the people who are just still seeing it as a content creation tool or like an assistant, I think those people are using like 1% of what these tools can do.
Noel (23:04)
Definitely. Yeah, there's so much more it can do autonomously these days. It's pretty incredible. I mean, like you said, you don't have to sit and watch it anymore. But there are times where it's like, at first I was like, I'm going to watch this at least 10 times just to make sure. You know, even though I'm pretty happy that it's going to do what I've asked it to do, you still got to sit there and watch it. But you would do the same with an apprentice or a graduate that comes into your business. They could be incredibly clever. I mean, any LLM is like PhD level. So they're incredibly clever, but they know nothing about the business and how it operates. So you need to take that sort of knowledge and superpowers from the AI, but handhold it as if it is somebody brand new into your business. That's, I think that's kind of where some people go slightly awry with it. They just say, yeah, go for it.
Katie (24:18)
Yeah, they forget to onboard it.
Noel (24:42)
Yeah. It needs handholding and then you need to check back in with it and go, I wasn't quite happy with what you did there. This is how we want to do it. It goes, all right, yeah, sure. I'll do that going forward. Yeah, never asks for a pay rise though, which is always nice, I suppose.
Katie (24:46)
Yeah, true. So talking of employees, I feel like these new models and upgrades can actually save you money because you don't need such a large team or even contractors. So I feel like it can also assist rather than replace. It's not just replacing, but it could be assisting you, could be assisting a member of staff. It can now do things like maybe a researcher can do or a junior marketer or data analyst. But it all depends on what your business is and what your business model is as well.
Because for some people who can afford, say, a researcher, then AI and LLM AI is going to be absolutely incredible and valuable for them. But then you might have a bigger business with a much bigger budget, and you go, well, I couldn't possibly get rid of my researcher because they find things that AI could never find.
Noel (26:10)
True, but then you could also arm that researcher with those LLMs to boost their productivity. So you don't need to hire another one, you just need to make the existing one more efficient. Because there's definitely when it comes to searching through thousands of documents and things like that within a knowledge base, no sort of data analyst or researcher or human being is going to get to the answer quicker than AI. It's probably going to, it might even find stuff that they wouldn't have naturally found anyway.
Katie (26:41)
Yeah, because I think sometimes we think it's either a team member or AI. And I think we often forget that actually, they work really well together. So it's not one or the other, you can have both. But I just love as well, like now you're not limited by the size of your team. You're only limited by how you use AI and workflows and automations.
Noel (27:07)
Yeah, you're limited by your time to build automations and workflows. Yeah, it's really awesome.
Katie (27:30)
Which I think is, yeah, I think so too. So now as well, I think you can delegate more important tasks. I mean, Noel, I don't know if you agree with that point.
Noel (27:38)
Well, yes, yes and no.
Katie (27:51)
So I feel like now AI is reliable enough to do things like market research, creating proposals, financial projections, helping with strategy, so many things. I mean, I could be here for an hour listing lots of things, couldn't I?
Noel (28:19)
Definitely.
Katie (28:21)
But a lot of these tasks that would take some people hours and hours and hours can take AI now just a few minutes.
Noel (28:31)
Yeah, definitely. The speed, once you get it all integrated and up and running as it should be and working, the speed of it could blow people away a bit because you can be, especially when it comes to proposals, things that are going to put you ahead of competitors. So you're getting in there first with whatever proposal, quotation or whatever, getting in there into a business, being the first one on the desk. I mean, that's invaluable. If you're the business that has sat there and you're typing it out manually or you're taking weeks to do it, then somebody's probably already beat you and they've got it in on day one. That's crazy.
Katie (29:23)
Yeah. But I feel like it's not just about speed as well. So it's not just about how fast AI can do these things. It's also allowing you to have more time back so you can do more things, achieve more things, whatever that is you want to do with that time within your business.
Noel (29:37)
Yeah, I guess in a way it kind of makes people more productive because they can go off and do different tasks. But I guess from a retention perspective, if someone's in your business and they're doing lots of repetitive, really boring stuff, and then a really fancy new job comes up and it's not much of a pay rise, but they know they don't have to deal with all this rubbish work, they're going to go off to the other business. So I guess it makes the working environment a lot nicer. They're doing stuff that they really enjoy, and that just helps everyone. Yeah. More time for a cup of tea and a chat around the water cooler, I don't know. Or the photocopier.
Katie (30:47)
I was always at the photocopier or the printer. Because I could pretend, one, I could pretend I was in the photocopying queue. There wasn't a queue, obviously. I was just chatting. Or with the printer, I was waiting for my stuff to be printed and I was just like waiting behind someone who was printing off a massive document.
Noel (30:59)
Geniuses of doing nothing.
Katie (31:13)
I was, I know, I was such a great employee. And people often ask why I quit corporate. I was never at my desk.
Noel (31:18)
Yeah. Then you joined the Navy where hiding was an actual profession.
Katie (31:33)
Yeah, I feel like that just went up five levels. Like I thought I was quite good at not being at my desk, but I feel like I learned a lot from being in the Navy.
Noel (31:47)
Yeah.
Katie (31:55)
So, Noel, I feel like we're not in the "AI helps a little bit" phase anymore. I feel like AI becomes part of your operations, your business. It's becoming your apprentice or your junior employee. How are you viewing it with all of these upgrades?
Noel (32:26)
Yeah, I definitely agree that it's going to change how you scale businesses in the future. And although I know we talked quite a bit about it taking your job in earlier episodes, I don't think anyone's going to lose any work, but I think it could potentially get harder for people to get into employment because especially with startups or small businesses looking to scale, they're probably not going to look to employ someone. They're probably going to look to use AI and then train that to do exactly what they want. There's no overhead costs with that either, which is also good, I suppose.
Katie (33:12)
Yeah, but going back to what we were saying earlier, it's not replacing and it's not one or the other. It's almost giving your current employee AI tools to help in a system.
So if that employee or contractor can really do the job well by themselves or with the help of AI, which I'm guessing it's going to be trained on your business, then that makes them actually irreplaceable almost, doesn't it? Or really hard to replace.
Noel (33:48)
Definitely. Yeah. Because you can't really teach a human everything about your business. Obviously the owner, if they've created it from day one, they'll have a good idea, but as it grows, not everyone could know everything. But if you give AI access to, I wouldn't say everything, but a lot of it, it will remember and show you things that you've done in the past that you probably think wow, okay, I completely forgot we did that. But it has access to those files and documents and goes, this is what we did last time. Yeah, that's really, really helpful. It does it in like two minutes.
Katie (34:39)
Noel, is there anything else that you feel you would like to add?
Noel (34:45)
I don't think there is. I think we've covered a hell of a lot. There's a lot of new tools now with Gemini, as I say, on the Google AI Studio you can give a lot of them a go for free. So definitely go and do that before you start implementing the APIs in the business and you start paying for them. You can try before you buy, which is brilliant. So yeah, definitely start giving it a go and obviously start thinking about building those agents that are going to sit by you and whoever you work with, things that are there to help you scale the business. Yeah, who knows, as soon as we hit end on recording this podcast episode, I'm sure OpenAI will release something and they'll be like, oh, you know.
Katie (35:35)
I imagine so.
Noel (35:39)
Yeah, it's just crazy. Get it all out before Christmas.
Katie (35:44)
Well, before the end of the year.
Noel (35:48)
Yeah, exactly, yeah.
Katie (35:50)
And if you would like any help with building AI or automations for your business and you want some help, some handholding, then we would love for you to come and join our membership, which is called AI Business Club. In there, we teach you step by step on how to create your first automation, how to create things like custom GPTs, along with a lot of other things.
And we pare back all the overwhelming noise and information and we tell you what you need to know to get the task done. And of course, Noel and myself are on hand if you've got any questions, need any help or any support. And we keep this updated as much as we possibly can because as we know in the AI world, things get updated pretty fast. Just when you think you've got used to one thing and then wham, they release new things. It's hard to keep up, but we would absolutely love for you to come and join that. You can search it on Skool: AI Business Club, or we'll leave the link below for you. We would absolutely love to have you join. Everyone is very, very welcome. We've got people in there who are brand new beginners.
We've got people in there who have got a bit of AI and automation experience as well. So if you're not sure if it's the right fit for you, please reach out to us. We will only tell you if it is the right fit for you. If it's not, we'll point you in a different direction because we only want people in there that is a good fit and it's the right space for you. Thank you so, so much for listening to this week's episode, and we will catch you next time very soon.
