Frontier AI. Proven on Main Street.
We test cutting-edge AI to help small businesses grow.
About the lab
AI Brands Lab is a workbench, not a think tank. We buy the tools with our own money, run them on real jobs — mailers, landing pages, ad copy, short video, follow-up sequences — and write down what held up.
The lab grew out of nearly three decades in direct marketing, where the test always settles the argument. That habit carries over cleanly. A tool either moves a number on a real campaign with a real deadline, or it goes back on the shelf and we say so.
No affiliate-driven rave reviews. No breathless predictions. Just the results, the receipts, and what we'd do differently next time.
What you'll find
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Marketing you can run this week
Workflows written for a shop with three employees and no dedicated marketing department — the setup, the prompts, the guardrails, and the hour it actually takes.
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Case studies with the numbers left in
Full write-ups from live campaigns: what we spent, what we built, what it returned, and the parts that flopped before they worked.
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Reviews that name the limits
Tool-by-tool assessments covering pricing, the ceiling you hit on the free tier, where the output needs a human, and whether it's worth a small budget at all.
Why we're doing this
The tools are moving faster than the advice, and most of the advice is written by people who've never had to make payroll.
Enterprise budgets buy consultants to sort the useful from the noise. The hardware store, the insurance agency, the diner, and the two-truck HVAC outfit get left to guess — usually with a credit card and a free trial.
We're here to close that gap. Test first, publish plainly, and hand the shop on the corner the same leverage the big budget buys. If a tool can't earn its keep on Main Street, it doesn't belong in our recommendations.
On the bench next
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The scorecard A running public tally of every tool we've tested, scored on cost, output quality, and time saved.
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Field notes A short weekly email — what we tested, what changed, and what's safe to ignore.
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Prompt kits and templates Copy-and-go files for the jobs small businesses repeat: offers, follow-ups, listings, and local ads.
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Workshops In-person sessions for local owners who'd rather learn it once, in a room, with their own laptop open.
Follow our journey
The lab opens soon. Until then, we're posting the tests as we run them — the wins, the dead ends, and the invoices that made us rethink a recommendation.