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Smarter Than Busy #7 : Major Releases and Cleaning-up Your Thinking

📬 Insights at the intersection of AI, small business, and working smarter.

Author

Gordon Meagher
December 19, 2025

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Smarter Than Busy. This week, we feature Agent Mode, a prompt that will help you remove spinning plates and get some clarity in your business when everything seems out of control. 

Let’s dive in.

đź“° Essential LLM Updates for SMBs

A weekly round-up of the only AI platform changes that matter to small-business operators. No hype, no clutter — just the updates that save time, reduce workload, or add real leverage.

🧠 OpenAI Launches GPT‑5.2 (Major Productivity & Reasoning Upgrade)

OpenAI has released GPT‑5.2, the newest flagship model in the GPT series, improving long-context handling, reasoning quality, multi-step task execution, spreadsheet and presentation generation, and complex analysis. This model is now rolling out across ChatGPT and related tools.

SMB Takeaway:

This is a quality-of-work upgrade, not a novelty upgrade. Day-to-day tasks like SOP creation, internal documentation, offer writing, and operational planning now require less babysitting. Outputs are more dependable and need fewer rewrites.

🧠 OpenAI Rolls Back Auto Model Routing to GPT‑5.2 Instant for Most Users

OpenAI quietly adjusted how ChatGPT routes models. Free and entry-tier users now default to GPT‑5.2 Instant instead of an automatic “best model” router, while higher tiers retain advanced routing.

SMB Takeaway:

This affects output depth. If your business relies on ChatGPT for complex thinking, audits, or planning, you may need to explicitly select higher reasoning models or review seat licenses to avoid silent quality drops.

🤖 Anthropic Introduces Agent Skills as an Open Standard

Anthropic has released Agent Skills, a standardized framework for reusable AI capabilities (such as summarizing calls, updating CRMs, or generating proposals) that can work across tools, not just inside Claude.

SMB Takeaway:

This is foundational for real automation. SMBs can start building durable AI workflows rather than relying on one-off prompts, reducing tool lock-in and making automation more resilient as platforms change.

🎙️ ChatGPT Voice Is Fully Integrated Into the Main Chat Experience

ChatGPT Voice is no longer a separate mode. Users can speak naturally, see visual responses, share images, and continue tasks seamlessly within the same conversation.

SMB Takeaway:

This turns ChatGPT into a usable field assistant. Ideal for founders, consultants, and operators who work away from a desk. Expect higher AI usage during actual work, not just during planning time.

đź“Š Microsoft Launches Microsoft 365 Copilot Business for SMBs

Microsoft has rolled out Copilot Business, a Copilot tier designed for companies with fewer than 300 seats, bringing AI assistance directly into Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Teams with a simplified setup.

SMB Takeaway:

This deletes admin time. Inbox triage, document drafting, meeting summaries, and spreadsheet insights become baseline capabilities. For teams already paying for Microsoft 365, the ROI case is now hard to ignore.

 đź•µď¸Źâ€Ťâ™‚️ Feature Spotlight Deep Dive

Each week, we spotlight a single AI feature from a major LLM platform that can help small teams gain time and work Smarter Than Busy.

This week’s feature is ChatGPT Agent Mode, also known as the ChatGPT Agent or Operator.

What Is Agent Mode?

Agent Mode represents a shift from a chatbot that only responds to prompts to an assistant that can carry out multi-step work on your behalf.

Standard ChatGPT responds to one prompt at a time. Agent Mode allows the AI to work toward a high-level goal, using tools such as a virtual browser, code execution, and file access to complete tasks step by step with human oversight.

For small and medium businesses, this acts as a force multiplier: It offloads time-intensive operational work without adding headcount.

đź’ˇ Why This Matters (For SMB Owners)

Most SMB teams don’t lack ideas — they lack time. Agent Mode helps by taking on the kind of work that normally drains hours:

  • repetitive research

  • prep work before decisions

  • admin-heavy tasks that require judgment, not just rules

This isn’t about replacing people. It’s about compressing effort.

⚡ How Agent Mode Works

You give the agent a goal, for example.

“Review our top 5 competitors’ websites, capture their current pricing and positioning for [Product/Service X], summarize the differences in a comparison table, and flag anything that looks materially different from last quarter.”

The agent then:

  1. breaks the goal into smaller steps

  2. executes those steps using available tools

  3. pauses when it needs clarification or approval

Unlike traditional automation tools that rely on rigid rules, Agent Mode is designed for unstructured work where steps vary each time.

🧩 Core Capabilities

Visual Browsing: The agent can navigate standard websites, scroll pages, click elements, and fill out forms. Some complex or protected sites may still require human help.

Tool Orchestration: It can move between a browser, a code environment, and uploaded files (spreadsheets, PDFs, documents) to complete a single task end-to-end.

Human-in-the-Loop Controls: For sensitive actions such as sending emails or submitting forms, the agent pauses and requests explicit approval before proceeding.

🎯 Where Agent Mode Is Useful

Competitive Intelligence: Instead of manually checking competitors, you can ask:

“Visit these competitor websites, capture current pricing for Product X, and summarize differences in a table.”

The agent gathers the data, organizes it, and hands it back for review.

Back-Office & Admin Prep: Agent Mode can assist with:

  • extracting data from invoices or receipts into spreadsheets

  • compiling lead lists from publicly available sources

  • drafting outreach emails or internal summaries

It reduces admin load while keeping humans in control.

Customer Support Triage: The agent can:

  • search internal knowledge bases

  • draft replies to common questions

  • check order or shipping status

This speeds response time without replacing human judgment.

Marketing & Content Support: Instead of stopping at copy generation, the agent can:

  • research industry topics

  • draft content outlines

  • prepare social posts or newsletters

  • suggest or generate supporting visuals

Content becomes a workflow, not a one-off task.

đźš« What Agent Mode Is Not

  • It is not fire-and-forget automation

  • It does not replace structured tools like Zapier

  • It should not run unattended on sensitive systems

Think of it as a junior operator — fast, capable, and supervised.

Bottom Line

Agent Mode is one of the first AI features that genuinely changes how work gets done.

For SMBs, its real value is simple: Fewer tabs. Fewer handoffs. Fewer wasted hours. Used carefully, it gives small teams leverage that previously required more people.

👇 Below are tutorials and resources to help you master Agent Mode this week:

đź’¬ Smarter Prompts

Each week, I share battle-tested prompts that you can start using today in your business. This Week Smarter Prompt  “Clarity First: Bringing Order to Business Overload”

What This Prompt Achieves

Most business problems don’t come from doing the wrong things; they come from having too many spinning plates in the air at once. When everything matters, nothing gets full attention because you’re just spread too thin, doing everything half-right.

When something starts to feel messy, such as marketing, support, or ops, the instinct is almost always the same: add more.

  • new tools

  • new processes

  • new advice

  • new tactics

The problem is that every new plate you add increases the chance that something will drop. That almost always makes the mess worse, not better.

This week, I’m sharing my cleanup prompt. If you’re feeling stretched, constantly interrupted, or stuck reacting all day, that’s not because you’re bad at business. It’s usually because too many decisions are being made too late, in too many places, by too many people.

This prompt will give you clarity and perspective, helping you take back control.

Click below to copy the prompt.

👇 Copy the below prompt and start using it today

đź“š Smarter Stack

Each week, I share plug-and-play resources from checklists, insights  and templates to actionable tutorials that help you build and optimize your Smarter-Than-Busy work stack.

Stop guessing which AI to pay for. In this video I compare ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity side-by-side so you can decide which AI subscription is actually worth your money - and when the free plans are enough.

Prompt Engineering helps to effectively design and improve prompts to get better results on different tasks with LLMs. This resource helps you understand advanced prompting engineering techniques that allow us to achieve more complex tasks and improve reliability and performance of LLMs.

Master on-page SEO for Google and ChatGPT with this 49-point checklist. The video guides viewers through each point, using practical examples and tools. A free checklist is available via the link in the description.

And that’s a wrap! 🎬

Thanks for spending a few minutes with this week’s Smarter Than Busy. I hope you found something useful, inspiring, or just plain interesting. I’ll be back next week with more insights, tools, and resources to make your work a little smarter (and your week a little lighter).

If this edition helped you, share it with someone who could use it too.

Until Next Week.