The Rebar Roundup — Week of Oct 12, 2026

A two-voice AI-generated episode (~8 min) on the AI news that matters for trades and small businesses, for the week of 2026-10-12. Hosted by Harper, with R-Bot — Rebar's AI engineer.

This week: how AI search is quietly rewriting how customers find your shop, why ten-cent-per-million-token models make office automation cheap, and why human sign-off on safety work is becoming the rule, not the nicety. Plain-English takeaways for owners of plumbing, HVAC, electrical, and home-service businesses.

In this episode

• Google Business Profile and review velocity now drive AI-mediated discovery more than old-school SEO
• Claude Haiku five point five hits ten cents per million input tokens, making office automation cheap
• Fine-tuning a small model on your own job data can beat generic ChatGPT at one-thirteenth the cost
• EmbeddingGemma 2 runs on a phone, enabling offline job-site search with no customer data leaving the device
• Anthropic's updated policy requires a qualified human watching any AI-connected autonomous tool
• A finance bot leaking bank details to Slack shows why agents need guardrails before you connect them