How AI And Bitcoin Payments Boost Business Profit In 2026

The next two years won’t reward the businesses that “wait and see.” We’re watching the economy tilt toward efficiency, and two forces are doing the tilting: AI automation that boosts profit per employee and modern payment rails that can cut fees, speed settlement, and change who you attract as a customer. We learned the hard way during COVID that fighting to restore the old model can cost years. This time, we want to help you see the shift early and move on purpose. 

We break down a real world Bitcoin payments story from Steak ’n Shake and why it matters even if you’ve never used crypto. When credit card processing fees sit around 2% to 3% and many businesses run on 2% margins, lowering payment friction can be the difference between treading water and building real profit. We also talk about Stripe expanding crypto payment options, Cash App enabling Bitcoin payments from a cash balance, and why “payment rails” is becoming a practical strategy topic for small business owners, ecommerce brands, and service companies. 

Then we zoom out to AI operational leverage, using the Magnificent Seven as a signal: rising margins, automated workflows, and fewer employees needed to produce the same output. To make it actionable, we share a 2026 business planning custom GPT designed to identify your biggest manual time wasters, suggest AI driven workflow fixes, and help you plan on a quarterly iteration cycle instead of an annual one. The link is in the notes, and we close with a challenge: pick one improvement that changes everything. 

If this helps, subscribe, share it with a friend who’s planning for 2026, and leave a review so more builders can find it. What’s the first process or fee you want to eliminate?

Transcript

A Painful COVID Business Lesson

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Alright, AI made simple. One of the most costly business mistakes I made was during COVID when I realized that I'd lost 75% of my revenue, half of my customer list. And then I fought, I fought hard for almost two years trying to claw back and get my business back to where it was before COVID. And looking back, is extremely painful. Um I wasted so much money and I I learned a lot of lessons. And so why am I telling you this is we are entering a similar um situation. If your business, if you're not realizing um, you're not seeing the signals or the writing on the wall, like I ignored during COVID, that business was never going back to the way it was, that the way that customers shopped, the way that uh your my employees uh wanted to work, um, all these things uh that I fought against, um, I paid the price. And if you're not looking at the signals of what's going on, this AI, um, that there's two things happening. Payment systems are changing, and AI is um revolutionizing every work process, every aspect of your business. No, no company is excluded. And Google's a great example of that. You know, they totally changed their business model, and you you'll notice that even in their search, their the bread and butter of their business is totally being um that business model is being disruptive, they're embracing it and they're starting to lead the way. It's taken them a couple of years to get their arms around it because they have a big ship to turn around, but you don't have a big ship, you have a small ship. And so, what would it be that you need to do if you could see around the corner, if you could look into the future and you're sitting here planning for 2026 now, you're coming up with a marketing plan or business plan. Um, what is it that you should do? And so today's uh episode is um specifically for that. I've designed a custom GPT for you to use. It's a 2026 business uh planning um custom GPT. That's what we're gonna cover, but let's start off with why this is important, what's at um risk in your story, and um and then we'll go from there. So for um this past last week, I was in El Salvador and I was attending a conference, a Bitcoin conference, and one of the main stories at that Bitcoin conference was um stake and shake. Now, recently stake and shake um changed. Uh they opened up a way for people to pay with Bitcoin. And people are going, well, what's the big deal? We don't use um Bitcoin at the moment, but here's what happened with um uh stake and shake. Their same store sales went up by 15%. Their product quality um improved. They um their customers that they started to attract had a uh certain uh profile. They wanted their food clean, they want um, they want to pay um with Bitcoin, uh, and so they want good service and they want to uh uh reward companies that are um accepting Bitcoin. And so the impact of this um this uh business case was uh very impressive to me. It's like, why, you know, when you start to think about it, well, what's the big deal? Well, the immediate thing was, you know, companies like uh stake and shake, they depend on credit cards as a primary source of um payments. And every single one of those uh credit card charges, you know, there's a two to three percent credit card fee there. And by setting up and uh um accepting Bitcoin, the payment goes directly from the customer directly to stake and shake, and there's no fee. And many businesses run on a profit margin of approximately these are e-com businesses or businesses that take a lot of credit cards, there, their profit margin is around 2%. And if you could double your profit margin on a percentage of transactions, that's huge. And of course, the big story, the other big story is um uh AI and what's going on with AI. So, with AI, for example, there's a segment of the SP called the Mag 7, the Magnificent Seven. These are companies like Amazon and Google and Apple, and their their um their profit margins are increasing significantly. But you know what they're also doing is they're uh they're letting employees go. There's uh many stories in the news how how um they're planning to Amazon, I think it was, I don't I don't remember the exact number, but thousands of employees over the next two years will be um yeah, aged out or or transitioned out of that business model. And so what are they doing? They're implementing robotics, they're implementing AI. And so these seven companies in the SP 500, their profits, if you segment them out of the SP uh 500, they're the ones that are dragging the uh impressive uh numbers in the SP 500. All those other 493 companies, they're staying flat for the most part. And the uh Mag 7, they're lurching forward with efficiencies and profit, and so these are the same people that benefited first in COVID. They were able to take advantage of the environment that we found ourselves in. They changed their business models to be able to do business with uh folks from a distance, and it took the rest of Wall Street, for example, uh, Main Street, it took the rest of Main Street a couple of years, like me, to get my model reconfigured and back on track. And so my job, my job is to help you look around the corner. That's the biggest value I bring to my customers, is like, what can we do if we're looking at what's going on in the world at the moment, what is it that you need to be embracing to set you up for success in the next six, twelve, twenty founds? And so if we can use um these indicators from the magnificent seven and stake and shake, yeah, yeah. Um, if we can take these little hints from this, then this is what we can do immediately to impact our business. What are the things that we need to change? What are the things we need to embrace? And so we're entering what's called the efficiency economy. And if we're to look at the uh impact from the Mag 7, you know, they're AI operational leverage, automated workflows, and zero marginal cost scales. And then the other velocity um shift, like stake and shake example, is the payment rails. We're seeing this happening in our, you know, everything in the Clarity Act, in the um, you know, the um legislation and conversations that are going on in the rearranging and configuring of our economy, bringing back all this manufacturing into the US, um, AI data centers is a big conversation. And so if you were to go, what do I need to do? Maybe you're not even using uh Bitcoin yourself, but Bitcoin payment rails, instant settlement, and bypassing these uh credit card fees, this could be a big shift for you. And it's not a it's not this big complicated thing. Um in just um the past couple of weeks, Stripe that's a uh payment system that many uh e-com businesses use, it uh opened up a way to receive payments via um crypto, specifically Bitcoin. And so in total, I um I think the number is well over um 10 million businesses just had the switch flipped that the option to receive Bitcoin as a payment is now there. They the those businesses didn't have to do anything, they're already using Stripe, and now there's a little place inside of their account that they can allow to receive Bitcoin payments. And again, all of a sudden, they're able to avoid all of those fees that your credit card companies are charging them. And secondly, uh Cash App, for example. Cash App is a payment system that many, I think over 53 million people worldwide use to send payments uh immediately from one person to another, is now you're able to use and pay in Bitcoin, even if you don't own Bitcoin. You can use your cash balance that'll immediately get um converted into Bitcoin should the company that you're paying via Cash App be motivating you in some way, incentivizing you to receive uh to pay them in Bitcoin. Obviously, um the advantage for the vendor is to avoid those fees, but there's going to be a benefit for you as a payee, um as the one that's paying to uh share in that upgrade. And so the the what what would happen to your business, what opportunities would open up if you were to start to embrace these uh two big levers in the um efficiency economy, and so where does this go with uh uh your business planning? Well, um I created a custom GPT for you. You can get that. This uh uh link for this custom GPT will be in this episode notes as well as uh in the newsletter and on our link tree that I'll share with you here in a moment. But let's look at this custom GPT and what you can expect from um using this as a business planner. So many of you are sitting down and starting to think about 2026 and what is your strategy for this coming year, and what can you do? And so, if we're able to have um use these little indicators of what our future looks like from the case um studies from the Mag 7 and the stake and shake example, then this is what we're we're talking about. We're wanting to figure out how to create more profit per employee by using AI and the labor um resource, lowering payment friction and fees by opening up crypto or instant settlement, and then faster iteration on cycles. You know, it used to be that every year I would go to a conference, um HubSpot conference, that's um a big uh CRM marketing um automation SaaS company, a significant company, and you would have to wait every year to go see what are the new things that are rolling out for the coming year. That would be a big deal. But now, um, if you're noticing on Chat GPT, Gemini, Grok, etc., those iterations that we used to wait a year to see are happening almost quarterly. And so you the same thinking needs to be is like what iteration do we need to do? We need to be thinking quarterly now, not annually. And so by using uh a custom GPT that I'm sharing with you here, that's fine-tuned with this um uh thinking and the system prompt, you can start to position yourself to future proof your roadmap, to see around the corner and to not be a victim of this big transition that's happening in the AI, just like I found myself during the COVID uh situation. And so this tool is designed. So, you know, I asked it, what can I expect from this GPT? And so I'm sharing with you that it's going to help you consider the three to five biggest manual time wasters in your business, um, how you can start to think about um leveraging the change in our payments system. We're moving from traditional bank um invoices, checks to uh USDC, stable coin, um, payment rails. And these are going to be a big, this is gonna impact your business, whether whether you're prepared for it or not. And so you might as well might as well get educated and might as well figure out, hey, how can I start to motivate um and take advantage of all the opportunities? And so this will help you share uh shift your paradigm, have a two-year horizon, and ask for a prediction um what's going to be happening. And so, you know, what you're gonna need to do is like just give it what your business does. Um, what's the current size of your business? And how how do you get customers today? And then where does it feel slow or or messy on your business? And so, so for example, I put in a prompt that says, all right, we're a roofing company, we repair roofs after damage andor products such as window replacement, etc. We do about five million a year, we get customers from referrals ads and a little bit of outbound. We could use a little more streamlined communication with the um the homeowners, coordinating jobs, supporting insurance, interfacing, helping clients do messy things that come up with the industry, insurance industry. And so it this is I set it on the thinking, so it's going into deeper, and so it spent some time thinking about this particular industry. And of course, you can put in anything that you want, and so uh the current state um would be that homeowner, you know, your customer communication is scattered. Uh homeowners are asking what's next, did you adjust your approve it? When are you coming? Replies live inside text threads, you know, you got your guys out on the field getting text on their personal phones, reps, email, and so insurance support, job coordination, and handoffs, uh repetitive support questions. And so the fix, let's stand up an AI-powered claim concierge and communications hub. And so this is a creative idea that maybe you've been feeling, maybe like uh, well, I want to, this is something I've been feeling, but I didn't know I could expect it. And so this will start to help you plan it out. And so obviously, it's talking about how to start routing all uh customer facing facing communication through a CRM andor a project board, how to add AI assistance to summarize call recordings, draft follow-up messages, some suggest replies to common homeowner insurance questions. And then AI templates, checklist, you know, one clean timeline per job. You know, this is and then how to start thinking about employee count, you know, how to apply your real numbers and set a target, and then how to start motivating zero fee financial transitions. And so even you know, there's a your first thinking is like, yeah, I'm I'm held hostage by how the insurance company operates, but um you've got opportunities based on this uh with your vendors, and so even though even though there are some uh opportunities you won't be able to address, what about your uh vendors, like your vendors and subs? And so you can start creating a perverted vendor program for roof crews, window installers, and your offers like if you accept instant payment uh within 24 hours of confirm, you you know, your prior prior priority for jobs that we come up with, and so there's a lot of things uh that you can do and think about and begin to implement and just brainstorm with this particular tool that the system pop prompt is designed to help you think proactively, and you can do this for any business. I'm just put in a roofing company, for example. And so um imagine, you know, the loneliest position as a leader of a company is that you wished you had someone to brainstorm a co-founder that you can brainstorm with, and and just people are people. Maybe they're not available, maybe you do have a co-founder, but maybe you have been working together so long, and and that's not not their thing. Well, how nice would it be to have a tool that you could just sit and brainstorm with and argue back and forth and go, all right, so all of this um is not important to me, but one item that really appeals to me is this. Tell me more about this, and then go go into it more in depth. Imagine if you just improved one thing, one thing in your business for the next year or your organization or your nonprofit, but maybe there's one great idea in here that could change the direction of your business, and and be asking questions like uh, you know, here's our typical products that we've done, but but what other products should I be considering? What, you know, where what of my tell it's your services that you offer, your products, and then just go, what are the trends in the news and in and the industry that are indicating that um this is not going to be um a valuable service to offer in the next year or two? What would you do if you knew that? If I knew COVID was coming around the corner when it did, brother, I would have I would have changed my attitude. I wouldn't have struggled so hard to try to get back to where I was. You know, I was at in this uh mindset of uh I'm not gonna give up, I'm gonna fight through it. But at some point I had to go, maybe, maybe this the problem here is me. Maybe I'm, you know, this trying to get back to where I was is the wrong attitude. And I had to start asking myself, what do I need to change? I had to change my model, I had to change my employees, I had to change my services, and that was huge. And that took me another year to get my arms around. And so so let me save you two years of pain and suffering and uh doubting yourself and give you a tool that's going to speed you up, that's gonna Think about it. All of your competitors, they're going to go through the same emotional arc that you are. What's this AI about? What's this new stable coin crypto payment? What is this? And they're going to resist, they're going to avoid it, but you could be using this custom GPT to help you understand it and how immediately to apply just two or three little things that could make a big giant difference for you. All right. So that's our talk for today. So if you want to grab, you can go to roionline.com forward slash link tree. This custom GPT will be in here as well, along with all of these other free custom GPTs that might be beneficial to you. And if you want a custom GPT designed for your business that knows you inside and out, then contact me. Tell your mom and dad. Tell everybody. We'll see you next week on AI Made Simple.