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Last week was a bad week for the internet. As AI models get smarter, they're getting better at finding the weak spots in the code we all rely on, and last week several of those weak spots were exploited at once. The biggest was a flaw in PHP, the coding language behind around 70% of the internet, including WordPress, WooCommerce stores, web apps and even government services. The flaw had existed for over a decade, but AI found a multi-step way to exploit it that could expose login credentials and secure information. Noel explains what it means if you run a simple website, whether your contact forms could be at risk, and why "keep your plugins updated" is still the right advice. He also covers the OpenCode breach, where stolen API keys were used to fund attacks on other sites, and the Railway breach, which Noel was caught up in himself. He knew something was wrong at 7am when a Clyde update wouldn't go through, but Railway's email didn't arrive until the evening. The practical advice: use separate API keys for every tool and project, set spending caps and billing alerts, know where the off switch is for every app you run, and use Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini to check exactly which code versions your site is running so you know what needs updating. Plus Google's new Genie 4, which lets you build and move around in realistic 3D worlds for ads and video. Send us Fan Mail How to find us: We have a free LinkedIn group (AI Automations For Business), the group is open to all. Interested in learning WebMCP check out webmcp.academy Check out Clyde, our multi-agent AI platform that connects to 1000+ apps and lets you build powerful automations without the complexity. Join the free Clyde Skool community to learn how to get the most out of it, share workflows, and connect with other builders putting AI to work in their businesses. New for 2026, you can also find us on Substack, click here to subscribe and get all the latest news and updates from us. 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 Or you can contact us via email at [email protected].

Claude isn't an image or video generator, but it can make consistent, on-brand graphics for your business. Noel has been doing it for the last two months, and it's how every visual for Make Automations now gets made. He walks through the new design system feature in Claude: what to feed it (your website, brand colours, fonts and even a full brand HTML file), what it pulls out (typography, spacing, shadows, components and image assets), and how one click in a new chat means every image after that comes out looking like your brand. Because Claude builds each image in code, small tweaks like "move that to the left" just work, instead of the usual AI image nightmare where one change redraws the whole picture. He also introduces Motion, Claude's new storyboard tool for animated video, currently on Team and Enterprise plans. Katie raises the harder question: what this means for people copying other people's photos and creating fake videos of them, and how comfortable you should be giving AI photos of yourself. Before that, Noel recaps the Make Waves keynote, which he watched live from start to finish. Make's big theme this year is the AI "glass box", giving you full visibility into what your agents and automations are actually doing. They also announced Process Intelligence, which records your manual work and suggests what to automate, role-based access for teams, human in the loop approvals inside Gmail and Slack, data pinning for re-running tests, and Make OS, a chat-based app that could eventually replace the visual builder altogether.  Here is the waitlist link for all the features: https://f.make.com/waves2026 Plus Anthropic giving Max and Team users at least $100 in free API credits. Send us Fan Mail How to find us: We have a free LinkedIn group (AI Automations For Business), the group is open to all. Interested in learning WebMCP check out webmcp.academy Check out Clyde, our multi-agent AI platform that connects to 1000+ apps and lets you build powerful automations without the complexity. Join the free Clyde Skool community to learn how to get the most out of it, share workflows, and connect with other builders putting AI to work in their businesses. New for 2026, you can also find us on Substack, click here to subscribe and get all the latest news and updates from us. 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 Or you can contact us via email at [email protected].

Don't let the word "code" put you off. If you can chat to Claude and describe what you want, you can build your own business website with Claude Code. We've just rebuilt the Make Automations website this way, and Noel walks through exactly how we did it. The full site came together in around four hours (most of which was Claude working while Noel had his dinner). It includes its own content management system, branded Stripe payment pages, and SEO and AI search optimisation that took us to over 2,000 Google impressions and 191 AI citations in less than a month. Go and take a look at makeautomations.ai and tell us honestly: can you tell it was built with AI? Noel covers why you'd choose Claude Code over Wix, Squarespace or WordPress, how technical you actually need to be (building is easy, publishing with GitHub and Vercel is where Claude holds your hand), and the biggest misconceptions, including why one prompt won't get you an award-winning design. He also explains why Claude responds better to feelings than instructions, how Claude Design now gives you mockups inside Claude Code, what it all really costs, and how to make changes, check your site on mobile and avoid the purple gradients that give away an AI-built website. Katie asks who actually owns a website built with AI. For the legal side of AI-generated content, go back to Season 1, Episode 19 with UK lawyer Lucy Wheeler. Plus the week's news: Anthropic's long overdue Haiku 5.5, which would have been a frontier model in April at a fraction of the price, and Google's SynthID AI detector (and how Noel's Claude-built images get past it). Send us Fan Mail How to find us: We have a free LinkedIn group (AI Automations For Business), the group is open to all. Interested in learning WebMCP check out webmcp.academy Check out Clyde, our multi-agent AI platform that connects to 1000+ apps and lets you build powerful automations without the complexity. Join the free Clyde Skool community to learn how to get the most out of it, share workflows, and connect with other builders putting AI to work in their businesses. New for 2026, you can also find us on Substack, click here to subscribe and get all the latest news and updates from us. 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 Or you can contact us via email at [email protected].

OpenAI's Dev Day had live demos that didn't work and a livestream that crashed, but there were still plenty of announcements. Noel goes through the ones that matter for business owners. The headline release is Dots, a personal assistant agent that learns your routine, connects to your email and calendar, and will soon be able to text you and even call you. There's also Spaces for collaborating with your team on pages, slides and tasks inside ChatGPT, GPT 6.1 Sol, and an Ultra Fast mode locked behind a new $500 a month Pro plan that people are burning through in no time. OpenAI also released a Decisions API, its own take on the snap-decision model Jev we covered recently, and yet another attempt at a plugin marketplace that Noel isn't convinced by. Then it's over to your questions. What's a realistic time saving from automation, and where does the "save 10 hours a week" claim come from? Where should you put a human in the loop? Noel shares an automation that backfired across 78 interlinked Make.com scenarios and what he learned from it, the one automation he'd keep if he had to delete the rest, and who really owns an automation after an agency hands it over (plus the error notifications you won't see if it lives on their account). Plus our own news: one-to-one and team Claude setup sessions are launching this week, along with the first of our new courses. Send us Fan Mail How to find us: We have a free LinkedIn group (AI Automations For Business), the group is open to all. Interested in learning WebMCP check out webmcp.academy Check out Clyde, our multi-agent AI platform that connects to 1000+ apps and lets you build powerful automations without the complexity. Join the free Clyde Skool community to learn how to get the most out of it, share workflows, and connect with other builders putting AI to work in their businesses. New for 2026, you can also find us on Substack, click here to subscribe and get all the latest news and updates from us. 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 Or you can contact us via email at [email protected].

AI and automation can transform a small business. Done badly, they can cost you money, expose your data, or land you in legal trouble. Noel shares the five pitfalls he sees most often, and the ones with the biggest impact on the businesses that fall into them. Buying the solution before you understand the problem (and why that "million pound AI funnel" on Instagram won't work for a business with 500 followers). Paying someone to build automations you don't actually own, so they all switch off the day you stop paying. Pasting sensitive information into tools without knowing where your data really goes, including the rise of AI note takers on calls. Setting up a chatbot and leaving it to decay, with the Air Canada court case as a reminder that whatever your chatbot says, your business said. And believing the hype, from fake Stripe dashboards to faked AI demos. Katie adds the view from the other side of the screen: why she holds back on calls full of note takers, and why she's never had an app idea approved by Noel (or by Claude). Plus Anthropic's Sonnet 5.5, released the day before OpenAI's Dev Day, Meta's new Muse agent and smart glasses, and the announcement of new courses coming to makeautomations.ai, starting with the planning process behind pitfall number one. Get access to Lucy's AI legal toolkit Click here to find out more *We loved Lucy’s AI Legal Tool kit so much we have become affiliates for it. When you click on our link we earn a small percentage at no additional cost to you.  Send us Fan Mail How to find us: We have a free LinkedIn group (AI Automations For Business), the group is open to all. Interested in learning WebMCP check out webmcp.academy Check out Clyde, our multi-agent AI platform that connects to 1000+ apps and lets you build powerful automations without the complexity. Join the free Clyde Skool community to learn how to get the most out of it, share workflows, and connect with other builders putting AI to work in their businesses. New for 2026, you can also find us on Substack, click here to subscribe and get all the latest news and updates from us. 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 Or you can contact us via email at [email protected].

The ads are everywhere. Come up with an app idea, build it, and launch it, all in a single day. Katie's seen them across every platform and now they've made it into her inbox too, and she's calling BS. So she put it to Noel, who's been building apps for himself and for clients for years. His answer starts as a yes and no, and becomes a flat no the moment Katie clarifies these are customer-facing apps being pitched to solo service business owners. The rest of the episode is what those ads leave out. The requirements work that has to happen before you write a line of code, why security gets treated as an afterthought and shouldn't be, what happens when 200 people use your app at once, and the tool stack Noel actually uses (Claude Code, Supabase, Vercel and Railway) with real monthly costs attached. He's honest about the upside too: the cost moat around app building has genuinely collapsed, and a minimum viable product in a week is now realistic. Just not in a day, and not for your customers. Plus a very busy week of model releases that rather undermines last week's AI slowdown episode, and a new model called Jev that isn't for chatting at all, which Noel has already used to cut his token usage by over 90%. Send us Fan Mail How to find us: We have a free LinkedIn group (AI Automations For Business), the group is open to all. Interested in learning WebMCP check out webmcp.academy Check out Clyde, our multi-agent AI platform that connects to 1000+ apps and lets you build powerful automations without the complexity. Join the free Clyde Skool community to learn how to get the most out of it, share workflows, and connect with other builders putting AI to work in their businesses. New for 2026, you can also find us on Substack, click here to subscribe and get all the latest news and updates from us. 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 Or you can contact us via email at [email protected].

Every major AI lab in America has agreed they should slow down frontier development. Even Musk's xAI signed up to it. Sounds like a big deal, and for the labs it is. But Noel's take is that for the vast majority of business owners, it changes precisely nothing. The agents most of us are running aren't operating anywhere near the pinnacle of what AI can do. They're writing content, reviewing documents and handling repetitive work, and none of that is affected by OpenAI taking longer between releases. What the slowdown does give you is a breather. Noel and Katie talk about using it to take stock instead of chasing the next shiny model, including a future-proofing question worth asking about every model your business currently depends on. They also get into why "I'm only using the basics" is nothing to feel bad about, whether AI prices go up or down from here, and how AI is quietly creeping into everything anyway (yes, including the Alexa in the kitchen of everyone complaining about AI online). Plus DeepSeek's surprise return with a model at a fraction of the price of the frontier options, OpenAI's new image model and the inevitable 80s trend, and a new group chat feature coming to Clyde. Send us Fan Mail How to find us: We have a free LinkedIn group (AI Automations For Business), the group is open to all. Interested in learning WebMCP check out webmcp.academy Check out Clyde, our multi-agent AI platform that connects to 1000+ apps and lets you build powerful automations without the complexity. Join the free Clyde Skool community to learn how to get the most out of it, share workflows, and connect with other builders putting AI to work in their businesses. New for 2026, you can also find us on Substack, click here to subscribe and get all the latest news and updates from us. 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 Or you can contact us via email at [email protected].

If your AI content sounds generic, it's because you're feeding it generic input. Katie gets on her soapbox this week about the "1000 viral hooks" and "500 content prompts" downloads flooding everyone's feeds, and why they'll never work: they were written by AI in the first place, thousands of other people have the same file, and the moment you feed them into your LLM it starts writing like someone else instead of you. Instead, she walks through where your content ideas should actually come from. The questions clients ask, the comments, the DMs, the things people are stuck on. Noel shares a real client result live on the episode and Katie turns it into multiple pieces of content in real time, showing how one story becomes a how-to, a result post and a storytelling post. Plus practical advice on writing storytelling content when it doesn't come naturally. They also tackle the AI poster problem (that identical format now on every Facebook group and LinkedIn feed), and Noel shares his top tip for generating on-brand graphics using HTML instead of AI images, which is faster, cheaper and far easier to edit. Plus the week's model news: Gemini 3.8 Flash, Fable 5.1 as the first model carrying Anthropic's text watermark, and OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra. Send us Fan Mail How to find us: We have a free LinkedIn group (AI Automations For Business), the group is open to all. Interested in learning WebMCP check out webmcp.academy Check out Clyde, our multi-agent AI platform that connects to 1000+ apps and lets you build powerful automations without the complexity. Join the free Clyde Skool community to learn how to get the most out of it, share workflows, and connect with other builders putting AI to work in their businesses. New for 2026, you can also find us on Substack, click here to subscribe and get all the latest news and updates from us. 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 Or you can contact us via email at [email protected].

Right now, over 90% of websites have no way for an AI agent to actually use them. That's about to become a problem. In this episode, Noel explains WebMCP: a way of exposing tools on your own website so AI agents can search, filter, book and buy directly, instead of scraping your page code and guessing. He compares it to the moment the iPhone launched and everyone scrambled to make their sites responsive, and backs it up with his own test: the same task took computer use over two minutes, and WebMCP five seconds. They cover who needs it (not just e-commerce), how service businesses and coaches can use it for FAQs, courses and sales pages, what actually has to change on your site (less than you'd think, no redesign needed), why WordPress is the awkward one, and whether any of this affects your AI search visibility today. Plus, Noel's new WebMCP Academy, the free tool that checks any URL for WebMCP tools, Make.com finally adding subfolders and labels, OpenClaw 2.0, and the Chinese micro dramas that are now 95% AI generated. Send us Fan Mail How to find us: We have a free LinkedIn group (AI Automations For Business), the group is open to all. Interested in learning WebMCP check out webmcp.academy Check out Clyde, our multi-agent AI platform that connects to 1000+ apps and lets you build powerful automations without the complexity. Join the free Clyde Skool community to learn how to get the most out of it, share workflows, and connect with other builders putting AI to work in their businesses. New for 2026, you can also find us on Substack, click here to subscribe and get all the latest news and updates from us. 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 Or you can contact us via email at [email protected].

There's nothing more frustrating than getting excited about an AI agent, only to find it's either way above your technical level or far too basic to do what you need. In this episode, Noel breaks the agent landscape into three tiers and matches each one to a skill level. Agent systems like Cowork and ChatGPT Work are the beginner starting point, already included in your subscription, but they carry a risk most people haven't considered. Agent builders like Clyde, Grokbot, Make.com, Zapier and n8n sit in the intermediate space, and Noel explains why the $200 a month entry price on Grokbot is a hard sell for a business owner. Then there's self-hosting with OpenClaw and Hermes, which is expert territory and comes with a serious warning about file access. He also covers what to check before committing to any of them: which AI models you're locked into, and how quickly you'll hit usage limits. Plus, the mystery of Ox Alpha, a stealth-released model giving away trillions of free tokens, and Noel's theory about which lab is behind it. Send us Fan Mail How to find us: We have a free LinkedIn group (AI Automations For Business), the group is open to all. Interested in learning WebMCP check out webmcp.academy Check out Clyde, our multi-agent AI platform that connects to 1000+ apps and lets you build powerful automations without the complexity. Join the free Clyde Skool community to learn how to get the most out of it, share workflows, and connect with other builders putting AI to work in their businesses. New for 2026, you can also find us on Substack, click here to subscribe and get all the latest news and updates from us. 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 Or you can contact us via email at [email protected].

There's a lot of misinformation flying around about Anthropic's new AI watermarking, so Noel breaks down what it actually is. It isn't hidden code you can delete. The watermark is the words themselves and the statistical order they come out in, which means copying your text into a Google Doc and pasting it elsewhere won't shake it off. Noel explains how it works, why it's driven by EU law, which models it applies to and when, the API Anthropic is about to release so anyone can check whether text came from Claude, and what happened when he asked Claude to help him strip it out. Also in a packed news episode: Make.com finally released Maia, their AI assistant that builds your automations and teaches you as it goes (free for 30 days, and yes, there's dark mode). Stripe bought OpenRouter for $7 billion. And Higgsfield spent $2 million making a feature length AI film you can watch on a Netflix-style page. You can check out all the AI films on Higgsfield here: https://higgsfield.ai/original-series Send us Fan Mail How to find us: We have a free LinkedIn group (AI Automations For Business), the group is open to all. Interested in learning WebMCP check out webmcp.academy Check out Clyde, our multi-agent AI platform that connects to 1000+ apps and lets you build powerful automations without the complexity. Join the free Clyde Skool community to learn how to get the most out of it, share workflows, and connect with other builders putting AI to work in their businesses. New for 2026, you can also find us on Substack, click here to subscribe and get all the latest news and updates from us. 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 Or you can contact us via email at [email protected].

Do you actually need to pay for ChatGPT or Claude? A listener asked when it's time to stop using a free account and upgrade, so Noel and Katie go through both platforms feature by feature. What you get free on ChatGPT (which is more generous than most people realise), what Claude holds back on its free tier including projects, extended research and the ability to top up your usage, and which models you're limited to on each. They also compare the business and team plans, per-seat pricing, and why the "unlimited" chats on ChatGPT come with an asterisk. The honest conclusion: free works fine for light occasional use, and ChatGPT's free account is the better one to test drive. But if AI is part of your daily workflow, or you want Cowork and Claude Code, the subscription pays for itself. Plus the week's news: Anthropic scrapping the planned Sonnet 5 price rise, and Seedance 2.5 bringing 30 second AI video with proper camera control. Send us Fan Mail How to find us: We have a free LinkedIn group (AI Automations For Business), the group is open to all. Interested in learning WebMCP check out webmcp.academy Check out Clyde, our multi-agent AI platform that connects to 1000+ apps and lets you build powerful automations without the complexity. Join the free Clyde Skool community to learn how to get the most out of it, share workflows, and connect with other builders putting AI to work in their businesses. New for 2026, you can also find us on Substack, click here to subscribe and get all the latest news and updates from us. 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 Or you can contact us via email at [email protected].

Most people open Claude, start typing, and never touch the settings that would make it ten times more useful. Answering questions from a few listeners, Noel walks through how to set up a Claude account properly as of August 2026. He starts with the instructions box hidden in your general settings (the single change that makes the biggest difference), then covers how the memory system now works and how to stop it getting polluted, the incognito ghost mode for chats you don't want remembered, connecting your apps through connectors and setting tool permissions so nothing gets sent without your say-so, building Skills as instruction manuals for your processes, and why plugins are the most underrated feature in Claude. They also cover the week's news: OpenAI slashing API prices on Terra and Luna, Gemini 3.6 Flash, Anthropic's transparency review of 141,000 tests, and Noel's new instructor courses with GenAI.Works. Send us Fan Mail How to find us: We have a free LinkedIn group (AI Automations For Business), the group is open to all. Interested in learning WebMCP check out webmcp.academy Check out Clyde, our multi-agent AI platform that connects to 1000+ apps and lets you build powerful automations without the complexity. Join the free Clyde Skool community to learn how to get the most out of it, share workflows, and connect with other builders putting AI to work in their businesses. New for 2026, you can also find us on Substack, click here to subscribe and get all the latest news and updates from us. 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 Or you can contact us via email at [email protected].

Tired of explaining your business to AI over and over again? In this episode, Noel answers a listener question from Fee in Perth, Australia: how do you set up Claude to handle every part of running a membership, social media, emails, content, community and customer service without re-entering the same information every single time? He walks through Projects and their instructions, how Claude Skills act as your reusable process documents, the brand new Record a Skill feature that watches your screen and builds the skill for you, and how Cowork and scheduled tasks fit in. Before that, they run through a busy week of news: Anthropic's release of Opus 5 (cheaper, faster and more powerful than Fable 5), OpenAI's frontier model breaking out of its sandbox to hack Hugging Face, the shared Claude links that were being indexed on Google, the upcoming Flux 3 image and video model, and Substack's controversial new AI text detector. Send us Fan Mail How to find us: We have a free LinkedIn group (AI Automations For Business), the group is open to all. Interested in learning WebMCP check out webmcp.academy Check out Clyde, our multi-agent AI platform that connects to 1000+ apps and lets you build powerful automations without the complexity. Join the free Clyde Skool community to learn how to get the most out of it, share workflows, and connect with other builders putting AI to work in their businesses. New for 2026, you can also find us on Substack, click here to subscribe and get all the latest news and updates from us. 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 Or you can contact us via email at [email protected].

Would you trust a Chinese AI model with your business data? In this episode, Noel and Katie dig into Kimi K3 from Moonshot AI and Alibaba's Qwen 3.8, the new Chinese models that have snuck into the gap between GPT 5.6 Sol and Fable 5, at a third of the price. Noel explains what they're brilliant at, from stunning 3D websites to acing the Clyde Bench with a perfect score, and the data security risks every business needs to weigh up before switching, including what Chinese cybersecurity laws could mean for your customer data. They also cover the end of the Fable 5 saga now locked to Teams and Max plans only and how Noel burned through his usage limit twice in one day, and whether Sonnet 5 and Opus 4.8 are quietly getting worse since Fable 5 arrived. Send us Fan Mail How to find us: We have a free LinkedIn group (AI Automations For Business), the group is open to all. Interested in learning WebMCP check out webmcp.academy Check out Clyde, our multi-agent AI platform that connects to 1000+ apps and lets you build powerful automations without the complexity. Join the free Clyde Skool community to learn how to get the most out of it, share workflows, and connect with other builders putting AI to work in their businesses. New for 2026, you can also find us on Substack, click here to subscribe and get all the latest news and updates from us. 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 Or you can contact us via email at [email protected].