George Iacovacci

Fractional AI Advisor for mid-market CEOs | Deploy AI without wasted spend or headcount loss | Founder @CEOAIAdvisor | Practical AI for real growth. CDO | CMO

[George Iacovacci @Gvacci]

Your AI strategy isn't a technology problem. It never was.
A thread for CEOs and executives who need to hear this 👇 🧵

[George Iacovacci @Gvacci]

ChatGPT now has its own Google Business Profile. Yours is probably unclaimed.

OpenAI just launched Businesses in ChatGPT (beta):

→ Claim and verify your business in Business Hub
→ Add product feeds with pricing and availability
→ See mentions, clicks, and the topics where your site gets cited
→ Eligible U.S. ecommerce and online service businesses can launch a Business Agent that answers buyer questions right inside ChatGPT

Claiming is the easy part.

The real work is making sure what ChatGPT finds about you is accurate, current, and owned by someone on your team.

An AI agent built on messy data is just a confident rep giving the wrong answers.

Run a business or lead its marketing? DM me your company name. I'll check what ChatGPT says about you and send the 3 things I'd fix first.

#ChatGPT #SmallBusiness

[George Iacovacci @Gvacci]

Your team is already using AI.

You just don't know which tools, on whose card, and with what company data.

[George Iacovacci @Gvacci]

Most mid-market AI spend isn't a strategy.

It's a pile of subscriptions nobody owns.

[George Iacovacci @Gvacci]

Cheap AI pricing is often a promotion.

Gemini 4 Argon: $2 in / $10 out per million tokens today. $4 / $20 on Dec 1.

That's the developer API, not consumer plans. But anything built on it can get pricier.

Ask your vendors now, not in January.

#AIStrategy

[George Iacovacci @Gvacci]

Stop asking which AI tool to buy.

Ask which decision you want made faster.

[George Iacovacci @Gvacci]

AI use among UK businesses just doubled in a year: 16% → 32%.

But among firms reporting a cost effect:

24% saw costs fall
64% saw no change
9% saw costs rise

Half of adopters report higher productivity, real gains, but modest.

Solution: Run one pilot with a measurable outcome: hours saved, time per ticket, cost per lead, or days to close. Then decide whether to scale it.

Source: UK Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, AI Adoption Survey 2026

[George Iacovacci @Gvacci]

A fractional AI advisor should make himself unnecessary in 12 months.

Most are built to stay forever.

[George Iacovacci @Gvacci]

Your customers stopped searching for what you sell.

They started describing their problem.

From Shopify's new holiday report, a clothing brand co-founder: "Nobody with eczema types 'hypoallergenic bra.'"

They type "my bra makes my skin burn." Search engines never got that. AI does.

That brand's AI-referred sales: up 276% year over year.

65% of shoppers plan to use AI for at least one shopping task this holiday season.

AI doesn't recommend the business with the best keywords. It recommends the one that explains the customer's problem best.

Question for every CEO this week:

Does your website describe what you sell, or the problem your customer is trying to solve?

AI will only recommend one of those.

[George Iacovacci @Gvacci]

The expensive AI mistake isn't the wrong tool.

It's letting AI embed in your workflows before leadership decides those workflows should exist.

[George Iacovacci @Gvacci]

What's the last thing your team said would take weeks that you suspect takes an afternoon?

I built a working digital business card with Claude on the way to an event today. Curious what you're being quoted on.

[George Iacovacci @Gvacci]

If you can't answer "What did AI return last quarter?" in 30 seconds, your board will eventually ask.

Better to have the answer before they do.

[George Iacovacci @Gvacci]

CEOs: what's the one task you'd hand to AI tomorrow if you trusted it?

Reply with yours.

[George Iacovacci @Gvacci]

I built my business card in the car on the way to an event full of IT executives.

About 25 minutes. I talked to Claude Code, it built the page, and I made one fix in Vercel. That's it.

Real page. My own domain. Save-contact button and QR code.

The card isn't the point.

The point is that the gap between "I need this" and "it exists" is now minutes. Most companies still measure it in quarters.

(GitHub and Vercel were already set up. That's the part worth getting in place first.)

[George Iacovacci @Gvacci]

Who owns AI in your company?

CEO, CTO, nobody, or everyone?

Be honest.

[George Iacovacci @Gvacci]

Your best buyers may be arriving from a channel you can't see.

That's not a trend. It's a blind spot.

Google just gave you the clue. On its Q3 call, it named lower AI Mode monetization as one reason Search growth slowed. Its fix: more ads inside AI Mode, now in 10 more countries.

Meanwhile, Adobe's September data (U.S. retail): AI-referred traffic produced 83% higher revenue per visit and converted 90% better than non-AI traffic.

→ AI answers earn Google less per query
→ Google is filling them with ads
→ The buyers coming out the other side convert better

Different channel. Different economics. It needs its own line in your reporting.

Caveat: Adobe's data is retail. Test it against your own funnel.

When a buyer asks AI who to hire in your category, does it name you or a competitor?

[George Iacovacci @Gvacci]

Only $1 in $5 of enterprise token spend shows up as a measurable financial result. (Accenture, 750 execs)

Token use is projected to grow 78% in the next 24 months.

Companies that can prove ROI in 2027 will reallocate faster and pull away from everyone else.

#AIROI

[Sundar Pichai @sundarpichai]

Gemini 4 Argon is here.

It’s available globally today for developers and enterprises in the paid tier of the Gemini API and the Gemini platform, for Ultra subscribers in Google Antigravity, and Ultra and Pro subscribers in the Gemini app and Search.

Hope you all enjoy it!

[ClaudeDevs @ClaudeDevs]

You can now mod Claude Code:

- Change how it behaves
- Customize the UI
- Swap in your own features

Write one with a few lines of TypeScript, or have Claude build it for you. Mods ship inside plugins, so you install them with /plugin in the CLI or desktop app.

A few examples:

[George Iacovacci @Gvacci]

Vast majority of organizations are so far behind…so true

[a16z @a16z]

Databricks' @alighodsi on why most companies wouldn't even notice if frontier AI models stopped advancing:

"The models are smart enough, but they just don't have the context that exists inside any organization. They have not been in every meeting. They don't know what's in everybody's heads. They don't know all the processes."

"There's always a couple of employees who know everything in every organization. You go tap on their shoulder, and everybody's like, 'Oh my God, what would happen if he or she quits?' [The models] don't have that context."

"If you just fused that and gave that context to the AI models... I think there are so many productivity gains you could get for any organization on the planet. For that, we actually don't need smarter models."

"We don't need a smarter model that can solve Navier-Stokes or conjectures or do better on Humanity's Last Exam."

"If the frontier doesn't advance, it doesn't actually matter, I think, for the vast majority of organizations on the planet. They're just so far behind in the adoption curve of actually automating things and getting value out of this stuff."

@alighodsi

[George Iacovacci @Gvacci]

Most CEOs are underestimating what AI can already do for them.

Not writing emails. Not summarizing documents.

This past weekend, I:

→ Rebuilt and relaunched my website
→ Built an AI Chief of Staff that preps my meetings, puts the key numbers in front of me with my morning coffee, and challenges my decisions before I make them

A few years ago, the first meant an agency and a few weeks.
The second meant another person on the team.

Now you can go from "I wonder if we could do this?" to "It's working." in a weekend.

The real opportunity isn't doing today's work faster.
It's gaining capabilities you didn't have last week.

And once you've built something yourself, your AI conversations with your team change. They stop being vague. They get specific.

So skip the massive transformation plan.

Build something useful. Solve one real problem.

Then ask your leadership team:
Not "How can we use AI?"
But "What can we do now that we couldn't do before?"