Turn AI Into Better Product and Service Pages

Grant Calloway

Here's a number that should make any owner sit up straight. Over 70 percent of small business leaders say they feel positive about AI. And nearly 40 percent of them say they haven't seen measurable results from it. That's a market that loves a product and can't find the receipt. Welcome to AI for Small Business. I'm Grant Calloway.

Grant Calloway

Those figures come from ECI Software Solutions' 2026 AI Readiness Report. They surveyed more than 550 small and mid sized business leaders in the United States, Canada, and Australia, back in November 2025. Thirty three percent said they feel very positive about AI, another 37 percent somewhat positive. So the myth that owners are dragging their feet? The data doesn't support it. The appetite is there. The payoff is the part that's missing.

Grant Calloway

The report points at a couple of culprits, and the first one is almost funny. A lot of owners believe they're using AI when they're really using automation. Automation follows preset rules. Send an invoice reminder every thirty days, that's automation, and a perfectly good one. AI, in the report's framing, uses historical payment data to predict which customers are likely to pay late and adjusts how you reach out. ECI says nearly 40 percent haven't seen measurable results, and it suggests that's likely because people are using basic tools that only scratch the surface. Calling a timer a brain doesn't make it one.

Grant Calloway

The second culprit is scattered effort. Owners point the new machine at whatever's easiest, and what's easiest is generic content. Another blog post about five tips for choosing a contractor. Another social caption. Content creation is where 40 percent of the surveyed businesses are experimenting, so that's where the volume goes. But a pile of generic posts is clutter. It's a trading floor full of people shouting and nobody holding an order.

Grant Calloway

Now put that next to what's happening on the other side of the counter. HubSpot's 2026 State of Marketing Report drew on more than 3,400 marketers worldwide, and the picture of the buyer has changed. Nearly 70 percent of those marketers say leads are arriving significantly later in the buying process, because customers do exhaustive, AI assisted research before they ever reach out. Ninety six percent of prospects research on their own before speaking with a human. Thirty seven percent of marketers say their leads are far more informed than they used to be. And nearly 30 percent report declining traditional search traffic as people move to AI search tools.

Grant Calloway

If you caught our earlier episode, 'Agent Ready or Invisible,' we talked about buyer side AI agents auditing vendor websites for raw data. This is the same dynamic with a human attached. The shopper has done the homework, often with an AI tutor at their elbow. By the time they land on your page, they're not asking who you are. They're checking dimensions, compatibility, material certifications, exact deliverables. They want the spec. If your page offers a warm paragraph about quality and passion, they close the tab and move to the one that answers the question.

Grant Calloway

So here's the one strategy I'd put on the table. Stop pointing AI at the top of the funnel, and point it at the bottom. Build what I'll call a deep spec decision engine: your product pages and service pages, enriched with the granular detail a late stage buyer is hunting for.

Grant Calloway

The proof point in the ECI report is a person named Vicky Sollars at The Business Supply Group. Writing one technical product description from scratch normally took her about 20 minutes, and longer when the information was scattered. Using ECI's ecommerce AI agent tool, she produced 50 descriptions in half an hour. Do the arithmetic, and by hand that batch would've run something like sixteen and a half hours. That's my math, not hers, but it shows the scale of the swing.

Grant Calloway

What I like more than the speed is a detail she mentioned. In her words, the tool even picked up whether a product was biodegradable. A human drafting at minute fourteen of a twenty minute slog skips that line. But a buyer who's been researching with an AI assistant might be filtering on exactly that line. It's a small fact that decides a purchase, and it was sitting in the manufacturer's data all along.

Grant Calloway

Now, a guardrail, because I've seen what happens when the machine runs without a hand on the brake. ECI's Chief Product and Technology Officer, Brian Winters, says, and I'm quoting, "Human oversight remains a fundamental cornerstone of responsible AI adoption." The AI does the heavy lifting: extracting, synthesizing, drafting. A person verifies the facts, checks any compliance claims, and makes sure it still sounds like your shop. If a description says a product is certified and it isn't, you've turned a sales page into a liability. Human in the loop isn't a slogan here. It's the part where you protect your name.

Grant Calloway

Here's the exercise, and it fits in a 45 minute block. First, pick five offerings. Choose ones with high margins, or ones where customers keep asking the same questions. Those are your best candidates, because the demand for answers is already proven.

Grant Calloway

Second, gather the raw material. For products, that's the manufacturer spec sheets. For services, it's your internal job logs, the real record of what you delivered, how long it took, and what materials you used.

Grant Calloway

Third, hand that material to a large language model and ask it to extract the decision critical specifications. Dimensions, compatibility, certifications, exact deliverables. Have it build a short comparison table and write a concise description that leads with those facts. Tell it to use only what's in the documents and to flag anything it can't find, rather than guessing.

Grant Calloway

Fourth, review every line against the source. Accuracy, compliance claims, tone. Then publish it directly to the product or service landing page, where the late arriving buyer will actually see it.

Grant Calloway

That's five pages doing real work, instead of five blog posts adding to the pile. And the report is fairly clear that this is how the successful owners operate. They pick one routine bottleneck, deliver a fast win, and build confidence from there.

Grant Calloway

One caution on expectations. The Sollars result is a documented case from a vendor's own report, so treat it as a proof point, not a promise. Your gains will depend on how good your source material is. Garbage spec sheets give you polished garbage. But a business whose pages answer the hard questions first will have an advantage over one still telling its origin story.

Grant Calloway

The buyers are already informed. The only open question is whether your page is. I'm Grant Calloway, and this has been AI for Small Business.