How the Agentic Economy Will Change Small Business

Good morning. I’m Bernadette, and this is your five-minute SYSTEMshift brief — the small shifts in everyday tools that can make your week a little lighter. Let’s make today easier. It’s Wednesday afternoon. You’ve got three leads to answer. A tech is running late. You’re halfway through a quote in a spreadsheet. You’re also calling suppliers for parts. Then a text comes in from the homeowner’s purchasing agent. Not the homeowner. A bot that’s shopping around. It offers a bundled price for the part plus installation, and it wants an answer. Breathe. A lot of owners have the same problem here. You’re doing pricing, scheduling, and supplier checks with your brain and your time. That leads to slow replies. More stress. And sometimes you either undercharge to win the job, or you lose the job because you took too long. And the honest thought is, I can’t compete with a bot. Right. Here’s the shift. People are calling it the agentic economy. That simply means customers will use software agents to buy, book, and negotiate on their behalf. An AI agent is just a tool that can search options, compare terms, send offers, and try to schedule, without the customer doing each step. What happens when the customer sends a bot to shop for them? This is exciting for small business, because it can reward the shops that are clear, consistent, and easy to do business with. Not just the cheapest. What changes in daily work is the front end. Your offer needs to be readable by humans and by software. That means simple service packages, clear warranty language, and a way to confirm availability without ten back-and-forth messages. You may also start seeing more “proposed” prices that look like negotiations, even when the customer never typed them. What does not change is what keeps you in business. Reliability. Showing up. Doing the job right. Fixing it when something goes wrong. Agents can’t replicate local trust and post-sale care quickly. And you are not behind. This is new for everyone. The winners will be the owners who make their work easier to buy, without giving away control. One safe experiment this week is to publish your terms in one clear place online. In Squarespace, go to Pages, click the plus sign, and add a page called Service and Warranty Terms. Give this about twenty minutes. Write your standard hours, what’s included in a common job, your warranty window, and how you handle parts. Then link it in your footer. This is low risk. You are not changing your pricing today. You are reducing misunderstandings and making it easier to respond when an agent comes in with an offer. Keep guardrails. Require written confirmation before any agent-initiated discount or supplier order. Verify warranty transfer rules. Save supplier invoices before you commit. One small experiment. One steady improvement. That’s enough. I’m Bernadette. Talk to you next week.