I think it's easy for those already in the tech industry to pooh-pooh this, as the previous comments on this post have.
Right now, people with ideas prompt their LLM by saying "I know how to make x, how do I turn that into a business?" Anthropic knows that, and releasing a playbook like this is a way to make people who haven't asked that question think to ask it.
For a non-technical person with a small business they don't know how to operationalize, an agentic workflow is a game changer. You might go from only getting 30% of your work time to build and improve your actual product to 50% or 70%.
Can you imagine having a knitting business, and suddenly being able to gauge interest for different colors with a website selector you'd have no idea how to automate? Or needing to close your shop for an upcoming holiday, and having Google and Apple Maps and your website all updated to reflect your closed dates cleanly, without having to fight through every UI? An engineer goes "bah", a baker goes "I just got to sleep two more hours".
I truly think that people in the tech industry do not understand how hard technology is for people who aren't in it.
> I truly think that people in the tech industry do not understand how hard technology is for people who aren't in it.
When it comes to AI, a lot of them don't want to understand because it threatens their livelihood.
> Can you imagine having a knitting business, and suddenly being able to gauge interest for different colors with a website selector you'd have no idea how to automate?
This does not sound like an issue small craft businesses have, but something programmer think is a thing.
I think you're thinking of the value in "creating a selector", which is not my point.
Businesses need to gauge interest and experiment with options. Knitting colors was my example of that, since I've got some personal experience helping a knitting business.
If you're a nontechnical craft business owner, the work of figuring out what questions to ask to grow your business is absolutely nonintuitive, and it's one of the things LLMs are best at. The fact that it can also modify your website or listing or what have you is an additional benefit; I chose to use that specific benefit to make the concept potentially more legible to the HN audience.