In our penultimate episode of the year, annual podcast guest and friend Trent Guyer returns to talk about all our favorite topics: AI, e-commerce, and small teams doing big things. Being the Christmas season, of course gifts are exchanged and toasts are made—but the real present is having Trent in the studio with us to chat marketing.

Among the gems dropped this episode:

• “Data makes you fast, your gut keeps you right.”
• 69% of B2B businesses cite bad data as their biggest barrier to fully leveraging AI.
• 89% of B2B customers plan to use AI tools to purchase products next year, compared to 34% of B2C customers.
• “Don’t ever give a customer a reason to regret after the fact doing business with you.”
• And more!

So grab some eggnog and your favorite blanket, and join us as we have another epic discussion with the VP of Marketing and Digital Strategy at Grasshopper Mowers, Trent Guyer.

Next week: Sam and Roop wrap 2025, Spotify-style!

—Trent, Sam, Roop, Claudia, and Chelsea

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Only three episodes left for 2025, and as we head toward the end of the year, Sam and Roop chat about something that may at first seem like a major problem (but is really just another opportunity to get your content in front of your customers) ... zero-click search.

What is it? Zero-click is when someone searches on Google (or another engine) and gets what they need right on the results page (shopping results, sports scores, answers to their question, etc.), so they don’t click through to any websites. Around 60% of all searches result in zero-click as of today, with that number as high as 77% on mobile. And as AI continues to embed itself in search culture, that number will likely only grow.

Bad news, right? Nope! Listen in as the gang covers this shifting behavior in search and how your website and its content are actually more important than ever.

And next week: Trent Guyer is back for Trent-a-palooza!

See you soon.

—Sam, Roop, Claudia and Chelsea

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It’s a short but sweet episode of Little Talks this week as Sam and Roop reflect on the year and all they’re thankful for.

It’s a short but sweet write up, too! : )

Have a great holiday weekend and we’ll see you next week.

— Sam, Roop, Chelsea and Claudia

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This week on the podcast, Sam, Roop and Claudia discuss when the appropriate time to put up Christmas decorations is. Before Thanksgiving? After? Never? There are opinions, but of course whatever you have planned works.

Speaking of planning, that's the real topic on this episode of Little Talks! Planning season (September through November-ish) isn’t just filling out calendars, it’s aligning business goals with media, content, and campaign priorities for the year ahead. And the best plans start with a look back. What actually worked vs. what just looked good on paper?

We find that campaign and content planning works best when clients involve us early. The more we know about business goals and sales cycles, the more we can build proactive, not reactive, marketing that delivers!

So listen in as Sam and Roop discuss planning season at Littlefield Agency, and let us know where you stand on the Christmas decorations! See you next week.

— Sam, Roop and Claudia

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Sam and Roop fire up the mics for another episode of Little Talks to talk (what else?), AI. This week, they discuss OpenAI and PayPal's new partnership that could change how people shop online, turning ChatGPT into an AI-powered shopping mall.

Starting next year, products from PayPal merchants will appear in ChatGPT’s search results across categories like fashion, home improvement, and electronics. Shoppers will be able to browse and buy directly within ChatGPT using PayPal or Venmo, with natural, personalized conversations that adapt to individual tastes, budgets, and past behavior. Could this partnership shift online shopping away from Google and Amazon?

The gang thinks this collaboration could mark the start of a new kind of competition, an “AI commerce” era where shopping isn’t just about clicks and carts, but about who controls the conversation.

— Sam, Roop and Claudia

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We're back with another AI-driven topic this week, agentic browsers. Specifically, after two weeks of using it, we give our thoughts on OpenAI's new Atlas browser.

Agentic browsers (browsers with integrated AI agents that can autonomously perform tasks by navigating and interacting with websites on a user's behalf) are here, and Roop says they have the potential to change the way we interact with the internet forever.

Instead of just showing web pages, these new browsers, like OpenAI’s Atlas (currently available to OSX users only), Perplexity’s Comet, are built to understand, plan, and act. They can read and interpret content, complete tasks, and even make purchases (!) on behalf of users. For marketers, this means the online audience is no longer made up of just people. AI agents will increasingly be the ones discovering, summarizing, and deciding what gets attention.

And as Sam and Roop have been discussing for a couple of months now, these AI shifts makes content quality and its structure more important than ever for brands.

So listen in as the gang gives their hands-on thoughts of Atlas, and join us next week when we talk AI again, this time OpenAI and PayPal's recent partnership and what it could mean for e-commerce in the near future.

— Sam, Roop and Claudia

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This week, Sam and Roop dive back into a hot topic, AI and SEO, to answer the question, “Is SEO for AI engines really something new?”

Spoiler alert: AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) aren’t entirely new strategies, they’re really evolutions of SEO. Google has confirmed that traditional SEO principles are still the foundation for gaining visibility in AI-driven answer engines. When users ask questions, AI systems don’t just find one article with a matching title. Instead, they break the query into smaller, related questions and then pulls the best, most credible snippets from across the web to form a complete answer. It's like twenty searches in one!

That means content today needs to be modular, well-organized, and clearly written so each section can stand alone as an authoritative answer. There are some new metrics, like share of voice and sentiment are emerging, but the key to showing up in answer engines and large language models (LLMs) remains solid SEO fundamentals: structure, clarity, and credibility. AEO and GEO represent the next step in SEO’s evolution, not a replacement for it.

But there are some tweaks to what you might be doing with your current content and its mechanical markup that are also vital in the age of AI. You'll have to listen to the episode to hear what those things are!

Next week the gang will be reviewing the ever expanding world of OpenAI and ChatGPT, this time in the form of a new browser (Atlas) that could change how we consume content on the internet in a massive way.

— Roop, Sam and Claudia

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Sam and Roop are back this week with a quick look ahead to 2026, where it’s pretty clear that the biggest marketing shifts will build on what defined 2025, AI-assisted tools becoming more sophisticated and in more widespread use. The difference now? We’re moving from experimentation to execution. The future is here.

If 2025 was about learning to use AI, 2026 will be about proving it can actually deliver.

So join the gang as they discuss three of the marketing trends they think will define 2026, including AI getting practical, AI ethics becoming a brand differentiator, and the rise of human-led content. Authenticity will outweigh polish, and subject matter experts, not just influencers, will define credibility.

— Sam, Roop and Claudia

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