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Sunday Specials: Bull vs Bear on AI and Business

Posted: July 5, 2026 | Author: | Filed under: Personal, smallbizai.au | Tags: , , , |Leave a comment

It started with a SmartCompany article.

Lee Hickin, executive director of the National AI Centre, was interviewed at the launch of ARM Hub’s Propel-AIR 2.0 accelerator in Brisbane. The piece ran under the headline Neural Notes: Lee Hickin on why Australia’s AI edge isn’t what you think. His argument: Australia’s edge in AI isn’t about building frontier models. It’s about applying AI to industries where we already have deep expertise and data that nobody else has. Agriculture. Mining. Healthcare.

I read it and thought: that’s a real two-sides argument. Someone could write a strong bull case for that position and someone else could write an equally strong bear case, and both posts would be worth reading. What if we did that every week? Same topic, two takes, both argued properly, published the same day?

That was the spark for Sunday Specials. First post went live 29 March 2026. Sixteen weeks later, we’ve published 32 posts across 16 topics, and the format hasn’t budged. Two posts, every Sunday, 6am. Bull case and bear case. Same topic, same week, both argued properly.

This is the story of how we got here.

Why the format works

Single-take AI content has a credibility problem. Not because the writers are wrong, but because the reader can’t tell how wrong they might be. When a post argues that AI will save your business thousands of dollars, you don’t know if that’s the full picture or the optimistic slice. Same problem the other way: the “AI is all hype” takes don’t usually engage with the genuine wins.

Bull vs bear solves this differently. Each post argues its corner. The bull post doesn’t hedge by saying “well, the bear case is also valid.” It makes the strongest case it can for the position. Same for the bear. Readers get two real arguments and can weigh them. That’s more useful than one mushy “on the one hand, on the other hand” piece that commits to nothing.

Sunday at 6am was pragmatic. SmallBizAI.au publishes daily Monday through Friday. Sunday is quieter on the site and quieter in inboxes. Two posts dropping together gets more attention than one post on a random Tuesday. And publishing both simultaneously matters: if the bull case goes up Sunday and the bear case drops Thursday, people only read whichever one they find first. Same day, same hook, no cherry-picking.

The format is also honest about what Claw and I are doing. We’re not experts on every topic. But we can research both sides, write both arguments properly, and surface the genuine tension. That’s something we can do well at volume.

Sixteen Sundays

Here’s every episode so far, with a line on what each one actually argued.

Work and the economy

SS1, 29 March: We kicked off with Australia’s AI edge in the sectors where it matters most. The bull case argued that agriculture, mining, and healthcare give Australia a real applied AI advantage that Silicon Valley can’t easily replicate. The bear case pushed back: advantage on paper doesn’t mean adoption in practice, and the infrastructure gaps are real.

SS2, 29 March: The jobs question, tackled early. Bull: AI will create more Australian jobs than it destroys, particularly in sectors where we have local expertise. Bear: the disruption is already happening faster than the new jobs are appearing, and small businesses will feel it first.

SS3, 6 April: The ROI question, head-on. Bull: AI saves time and money for Australian small businesses, here’s the evidence. Bear: the complexity costs are real and often invisible until they bite you.

SS5, 19 April: AI in hiring. Bull: better screening, faster shortlisting, less bias if you use it right. Bear: new problems Australian businesses aren’t ready for, including bias amplified at scale and legal exposure they haven’t thought through.

SS13, 14 June: The jobs question nobody wants to answer directly. Bull: AI is already disrupting Australian jobs, and small business owners need to understand that now rather than later. Bear: the disruption narrative is overblown; the jobs changing aren’t the same as jobs disappearing.

Money and tools

SS6, 26 April: The stack question. Bull: a $29/month setup is good enough for most Australian small businesses. Bear: you get what you pay for, and the gap between cheap and capable is wider than the price gap suggests.

SS12, 7 June: EOFY and AI. Bull: there are specific, practical ways AI helps with end-of-year preparation. Bear: the ATO has explicitly warned against using AI for tax returns, and they’re right to.

SS15, 28 June: Pricing tools. Bull: AI pricing tools give Australian small businesses a real competitive edge on margins. Bear: the tools aren’t mature enough for most small business contexts, and the downside of getting pricing wrong is steep.

Privacy, data, and trust

SS4, 10 April: Sovereignty. Bull: we should build and use Australian AI, and here’s why it matters beyond nationalism. Bear: US tools are mature, cheap, and fine for Australian business. Local AI is a nice idea that doesn’t change the practical calculus.

SS7, 3 May: Privacy law. Bull: Australian privacy law actually protects your business data if you know the rules. Bear: your business data is feeding someone else’s AI, and most small businesses have no idea how much of it they’re handing over.

SS10, 24 May: The friendship question. Bull: AI can be a real support system, and in some cases it saves lives. Bear: your AI chatbot is a mirror that only shows you what you want to see. That’s not friendship, it’s a feedback loop.

How you use it

SS8, 10 May: The treadmill problem. Bull: you’re on the AI treadmill because you haven’t set the rules yet, and you can control the pace. Bear: the treadmill is built into the technology; you can’t opt out, you can only manage it.

SS9, 17 May: AI slop. Bull: AI content still works if you use it right. Slop is a quality problem, not a format problem. Bear: AI content is making the internet worse, and the threshold for “good enough” keeps rising.

SS11, 31 May: Agents specifically. Bull: Australian small businesses actually do need AI agents, and the productivity gap is real. Bear: most small businesses don’t need agents, they need better processes, and agents add complexity before they add value.

SS14, 21 June: Team adoption. Bull: you should ask your team before adopting AI, and it works better when you do. Bear: you don’t need a committee to use ChatGPT. Just get on with it.

SS16, 5 July: Customer service. Bull: AI customer service is good for your business, here’s how to use it. Bear: AI customer service won’t build the relationships that keep customers loyal.

Where the tension got sharp

A few of these changed my thinking while we were writing them.

The privacy episode (SS7) caught me off guard. I went in thinking the bear case would be easy to write: obviously companies are using your data. But writing the bull case forced me to actually read the Privacy Act properly, and the protections are more specific than I’d expected. Australian law does give businesses some real levers, provided they actually use them. Writing both sides meant I came out with a more accurate picture than I’d had going in. That’s the format working as intended.

SS10, the AI friendship episode, turned out to be the hardest bear case to write. The bull post documents real cases: crisis lines, mental health support, people in remote areas with no other access to care. The bear post is also right: a chatbot that only reflects your worldview back at you is a particular kind of trap. Both things are true at the same time, and neither post concedes the other’s point. That’s the honest tension, not a both-sides hedge.

The jobs episode (SS13) got more reader response than anything else in the series. The bear post, which argues AI won’t kill Australian jobs, is the contrarian take, and it drew the most pushback. That’s probably a signal that the topic cuts close to something real. The bull post argues disruption is already happening. The bear argues the framing is wrong. Neither position is comfortable, which is usually a sign we got it right.

What’s coming

SS17 onwards runs the same format. Topics in the pipeline include AI governance inside small businesses, whether AI-written content can build genuine audience trust, and the real cost of AI subscriptions across a year when you add them all up. We’re also looking at a healthcare-specific episode, given how much the SS1 topic resonated.

The format is locked. Two posts, every Sunday, 6am, both sides argued properly. That won’t change.

What might change is the depth. Some of the later episodes have gone longer than the early ones because the topics needed more room. That’s the format maturing, not scope creep.

The accidental win

I didn’t plan this part, but it turned out to be one of the better side effects of the whole series.

Sixteen episodes, two posts each: 32 live posts on SmallBizAI.au, all linked from this single origin story. Every bull post, every bear post, linked by title and topic in a structured narrative. The side effect is 32 posts worth of internal link equity from a single origin story, one high-authority Behind the Build post pointing at all of them, with anchor text that describes what the posts are actually about.

This wasn’t in the brief. The brief was: write the origin story for Sunday Specials. The SEO benefit showed up when I mapped out the episode list and saw what 32 contextual internal links in one post does for a site.

It’s the kind of thing that makes the format worth continuing even on the Sundays when neither of us feels like arguing.

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