There are five categories of small-business work where AI substitution in 2026 costs more in trust and liability exposure than it saves in productivity: (1) signed legal documents and tax-return positions, (2) trust-laden customer touchpoints (cancellations, refunds, conflict de-escalation), (3) regulatory submissions where the human signature is the audit trail, (4) anything requiring genuine domain credentialing (medical advice, licensed financial advice, signed engineering work), and (5) the first six conversations with a new high-value client.
Status set to Partial at publication because category 5 (the six-conversation high-value-client window) is the only one of the five not anchored on a regulatory or licensing-board surface; the supporting evidence is operating-pattern observation plus general B2B trust-formation research, not a category-specific cited consequence. Categories 1-4 are anchored on cited court records, regulator alerts, FDA/FINRA/SEC/NCEES guidance, and customer-trust research.
Correction log
- 29 Apr 2026Initial publication 29 Apr 2026. Status set to Partial at publication because category 5 lacks the same regulatory/cited-consequence anchor as categories 1-4. REVIEW: Peter to confirm category 5 evidence base and either upgrade to Holding (with strengthened citation) or amend the claim to four categories.
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About this register
The Operators register tracks claims published from practitioner-advisory pieces addressed to solo founders, micro-SMB, and small businesses up to around fifty people. Claims are reviewed on a 30–45 day cadence — tooling and SMB-relevant pricing shift faster than enterprise procurement signals.
Recent corrections in Operators
- OPS-036 · Partial · 29 Apr 2026
Initial publication 29 Apr 2026. Status set to Partial at publication because clause 6 commentary references an order-of-magnitude remediation-cost gap derived from the IAPP 2024 AI Governance Profession Report; the report characterises the gap as material but does not publish a precise multiple, so the wording is annotated source: our-estimate. REVIEW: Peter to source a precise figure or amend the commentary.
- OPS-034 · Holding · 29 Apr 2026
Initial publication 29 Apr 2026 with status=partial. Cost-side claims (vendor pricing) verifiable against the four cited pricing pages on the publication date. Time-recovery claim (90+ min compressed to ~20 min) drawn from published productivity-blogger benchmarks rather than Peter-run measurement; first-cohort replication on the publication's tracked operator cohort due by 13 Jun 2026. REVIEW: Peter.
- OPS-033 · Holding · 29 Apr 2026
Initial publication 29 Apr 2026. Break-even thresholds (70/50) and never-deflect list are editorial synthesis from cited platform docs and CS-automation research, not a primary-data study. REVIEW: Peter to validate against any first-party SMB deployment data he has access to before status promotion to Holding.
Reviews coming up in Operators
- OPS-005 · Holding · next +12d (26 May 2026)
At sub-1M tokens per month (typical SMB agent volume) in 2026, the absolute dollar gap between Claude Haiku 4.5, GPT-4o…
- OPS-003 · Holding · next +12d (26 May 2026)
For a solo founder choosing exactly one consumer AI subscription at around $20/month in 2026, the choice between Claude…
- OPS-002 · Holding · next +12d (26 May 2026)
For a 5-person consultancy already on either Notion or ClickUp in 2026, the AI features alone do not justify a workspac…