Google's Agentic Calling and Checkout: Why the AI is the New Transaction Gatekeeper By Shashi Bellamkonda | Agentic AI Strategy Analysis The 10-Minute Hold and the Cart Abandonment that Just Vanished We all know the friction points of shopping: the wasted time checking if a local store has stock, and the frustration of waiting for a sale only to have the item sell out. Google is eliminating this by introducing Agentic Calling and Agentic Checkout. The customer no longer has to call to check availability or manually track prices and hit the buy button. The non-obvious business consequence is that the AI is now inserting itself at the beginning (research) and the end (purchase) of the transaction, effectively commoditizing the two most valuable steps that a local business previously controlled: the direct phone inquiry and the final checkout moment. The AI Takes the Busy Work, Local and Online The verified fact is that Google ...
The Small AI Economy: Why LLMs are Overkill for 80% of Your Business Tasks By Shashi Bellamkonda| Enterprise AI Strategy Analysis Stop Paying for General Intelligence When You Need a Specialist For the last two years, the default answer to every business problem was "Use the biggest LLM available." But we've reached an inflection point where that strategy is now just lazy and expensive. Running massive, generalized AI models for routine tasks, like processing a form or booking travel is total overkill. You're paying for a quantum computer when you only need a calculator. The non-obvious business consequence is that you don't need LLMs for most tasks; specialized, compact models will do the work faster, cheaper, and more privately. Microsoft's Fara-7B, a Small Language MThe Small AI Economy: Why LLMs are Overkill for 80% of Your Business Tasksodel (SLM), validates the shift to this "Small AI" economy. ...