OpenAI just made it cheaper to give your power users more room, a text-message AI chief of staff launched for owners who hate dashboards, and Figma's free ride is ending.

Your ChatGPT power users are probably hitting a wall. If you're on a ChatGPT Business plan and you've got one or two people doing heavy lifting, deep research, campaign builds, or code work, they're almost certainly running into the five-hour usage cap and then sitting on their hands. OpenAI just released a fix: Premium seats inside ChatGPT Business. Premium seats give those users 5x more usage than a standard seat and remove the cap entirely. The price is $100 per user per month on an annual plan, or $125 month-to-month. Standard seats stay at $20. The smart part is you can mix tiers in one workspace and reassign them as workloads shift. So you're not paying $100 for the person who checks ChatGPT twice a week. You pay it for the one person who'd otherwise waste an afternoon waiting for capacity to reset. If your team has even one person like that, the math probably works in your favor.

An AI assistant that runs over text, not another app. A company called Sabi just launched what they're calling an AI chief of staff for small-business founders. The pitch is simple: no new app, no prompt engineering, no dashboard to learn. It runs over SMS or iMessage. You connect it to Gmail or Outlook, Google Calendar, QuickBooks, and Stripe, and then it works. Inbox triage surfaces your top three emails that need a human reply and drafts responses in your voice. It sends you a brief ten minutes before a call. Ask for a P&L summary and it texts you a PDF. There's a "Night Shift" mode that processes your email overnight and has your morning brief ready when you wake up. This is genuinely different from most AI tools, which assume you're already comfortable talking to a chat interface. If you run your business by phone, this fits how you actually work. A free plan is available at meetsabi.com.

Figma's free AI features are about to cost money. If your team uses Figma for design, marketing assets, or UI work, this affects you. Figma quietly doubled the AI credits included in its Professional plan add-on packages, at no extra cost, for both new and existing customers. That sounds like good news, and it is, except the reason they're doubling credits is that Figma's design agent and its Weave collaboration tools are about to exit free beta and start consuming those credits. The doubling softens the landing, but the free ride is ending. If your team has been using these features without thinking about it, now is the time to check your credit balance and decide whether a monthly shared package or pay-as-you-go billing makes more sense for how you actually work.

Tools Worth a Look

[Sabi](https://meetsabi.com): AI chief of staff for small-business owners who manage by phone, not by software. Handles inbox triage, scheduling, financials, and content over SMS or iMessage. Free internship plan available.

[Wan 3.0 by Alibaba](https://wan.video): Drop in a slide deck, spreadsheet, report, or web page and get a 30-second video clip back. Good for turning existing marketing materials into short video without a production budget. Free public beta.

[LiveAvatar](https://www.liveavatar.com): Run unlimited simultaneous AI avatar video sessions for customer-facing video, onboarding, or support. No more session caps or concurrency slots. From $19/month, with per-minute rates that decrease at higher usage.

[Blinq MCP](https://blinq.me): Ask Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini questions about your Blinq contact network, who you met, notes, follow-up gaps, without leaving your AI tool. Included on Blinq Premium and Business plans.

Also Worth Knowing

Agentic AI adoption is slower than expected, and McKinsey says 66% of companies cite security as the top reason. The owners getting results start with tightly bounded tasks, not broad autonomous workflows.

Alibaba's Wan 3.0 turns documents, decks, and web pages into 30-second video clips. The public beta opened August 6 and is already being used in advertising and tourism content.

Substack now shows readers how much of a writer's work is AI-generated. If you publish newsletters or thought-leadership on Substack, heavy AI drafting without real editing is now visible to your audience and increasingly a trust problem.

Gumloop is a no-code AI workflow builder with drag-and-drop nodes and 1,500+ integrations, trending fast among small business owners who want to automate without writing code.

Claude Code Remote Control now lets you start a coding session from your phone, with dropped connections that self-heal and faster iOS loading.

Free AI Second Brain workshop on September 1 covers practical AI workflows for founders across ops, sales, and content for small teams.

Thomson Reuters built a legal AI model on Alibaba's open-source Qwen, trained on decades of Westlaw content. A signal that specialized vertical AI is coming for the professional services small businesses rely on.

OpenAI's Jalapeño chip benchmarks show faster response times than competing AI infrastructure, which over time should mean faster and cheaper API access.

LinkedIn published a guide to optimizing your brand for AI search results, practical for any owner who wants to show up when potential customers ask an AI tool for recommendations.

-Scott

SmartOwner is published (almost) daily by the team at DigitalTreehouse. Want AI consulting or automations for your business? Reply to this email.