Google took free AI workshops down Route 66.

What did Google actually run on Route 66?

A roadshow, not a product launch. Grow with Google says its AI training workshop tour for small businesses, "Make AI Work for You", stopped in five states along the Mother Road throughout August: Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona and California. Every one of those is an American state, and the tour has now finished.

The delivery route is the interesting part. Google says it worked in partnership with local chambers of commerce and Small Business Development Centers to bring hands-on, practical AI workshops directly to entrepreneurs. Hundreds of owners and community members joined in, on Google's own account, to work through everyday tasks, and the payoff it describes is hours a week given back.

That is the whole announcement. No new model, nothing to install, which is why it deserves more attention than most feature launches get.

Why should a business in Kent care about an American roadshow?

Because a workshop tour is not a product. It is a habit being taught, and habits cross borders better than licences do.

Look at what the rooms were doing. Google says that across every stop, local entrepreneurs and independent business owners brainstormed ways to solve operational challenges, manage their daily workloads and discover new ideas. Read that with a Kent firm in your head. An operational challenge is the quote sitting in your drafts since Tuesday. A daily workload is the forty minutes between the last job and the invoice nobody sends.

Google has not said which assistants were on the screens, which exercises were set, or how anyone measured an hour saved. Our read is that the missing detail matters little, because the value in an afternoon like that is rarely the tool. It is being made to name the three jobs you dread.

What did the owners in the room practise on?

Google's account stays on everyday tasks rather than campaigns, which is the distinction worth stealing. Here is how those categories land on a UK high street.

• The quote that never goes out. Photographs of the job, a rough scope, the prices you already charge, and a draft that sounds like you.
• Replies to reviews. The kind ones take seconds, the awkward ones take a week, because nobody wants to write them angry. A first draft you then edit is the whole trick, as in our guide to replying to Google reviews.
• The admin question at nine at night. What does this clause mean, is this receipt allowable, how should the deposit policy read. We covered the after-hours admin question already.
• Chasing. Suppliers, deposits, unsigned estimates, the customer who said yes in July. A polite chaser written for the sixth time is a task, not a craft.

None of that is glamorous and none of it is marketing. The wins are in the admin.

How much weight can you put on the sales figures?

Google offers one piece of evidence for the tour, and it rewards slow reading. Data from the US Chamber of Commerce shows that 85% of the small businesses who use AI saw an increase in sales over the past year and 82% grew their teams, Google says.

Two hedges go missing whenever that gets repeated. It is a US survey, and the firms in it already use AI, a group that skews towards businesses with a little slack in the week. Sales rising in the year a business started using AI is not the same as AI raising the sales. We would apply that caution to our own numbers and we apply it here.

What the figure is good for is direction of travel. When a company this size puts staff in halls along a highway to teach prompts to florists and garage owners, it has stopped treating this as an experiment.

Can a UK firm take the free training?

Here is where the postcode bites. Google says it continues to offer the Google AI Professional Certificate training at no cost to US small businesses, and that whether you joined the tour or are taking a first step today, you can explore free courses and resources anytime at Grow.Google/SMB.

Google has not said what a business in Sevenoaks pays, or whether the same enrolment is open here at all. Our read is plain: treat the free part as American until you have seen a checkout page in pounds, and treat the course list as worth ten minutes of your own reading, because looking costs nothing.

The training includes Google's newest vibe coding course, which it describes as built to help anyone become a builder, walking you through how to plan, test, debug and launch custom apps for your business using everyday language, with no coding knowledge needed. Note the order of those verbs. Debugging is the step small firms skip when a tool feels easy, and it is where a booking form that quietly loses every third enquiry gets caught.

Our read for a business of five people is that you will not replace your booking system this way. What you might build is the small internal thing nobody will ever sell you: a rota checker, or a quote calculator with your real rates in it.

What we are doing for clients this month

• Sitting down with owners and writing the list these workshops force out of people: the three tasks that eat the most time each week, named and timed, before anybody mentions a tool.
• Turning the most repeated of those into a written prompt they can paste, kept in a note on the phone rather than in somebody's head.
• Marking where a draft is safe and where it is not, so nothing carrying a price, a legal term or a safety claim goes out unread by a person.
• Checking whether the assistant a client already pays for covers the job, because a fair few small firms are paying twice without noticing.
• Keeping a record of minutes saved per task for a month, so carrying on is decided on evidence rather than on how clever it felt, which is the reporting shape in our case studies.

None of it needs a certificate, American or otherwise. It needs an hour and somebody honest about where the week goes.

What you should do this week

1. Write down the three jobs that take the most time and give you the least pleasure. Time one of them with a clock, so you have a before figure.
2. Run the worst one through a free assistant twice: once cold, once with your own past examples pasted in. The second attempt is the one that tells you anything.
3. Save the wording that worked. A prompt you cannot find again on Thursday is not a system.
4. Set the boundary out loud with whoever else works there. Drafts yes, anything with a price or a promise in it gets read by a person first.
5. Look at the free course list Google points to, work out what it costs a UK business before you plan around it, and move on if the answer is not clear.
6. Diary fifteen minutes in a month to check whether the time came back. If it did not, drop the whole thing without guilt.

Three objections, answered

"This was American, so it is marketing that has nothing to do with me." Half right. The tour, the sessions and the no-cost certificate are all tied to US small businesses, and nobody has published a timetable for bringing any of it here. The exercises are not geographical.

"I tried a chatbot and it wrote nonsense about my trade." Usually true on the first go, and it is the strongest argument against everything above. The fix is boring: feed it your actual prices, two real past quotes and the way you speak, then judge it. If it still writes nonsense with all that in front of it, you have your answer.

"I have no time to learn a new tool." Then do not learn a tool, do one task. Pick the single job you most resent and give it one sitting. Either the hour comes back or it does not, and you will know by Friday.

The verdict

There is nothing to switch on here, which makes this an easier week than most. The instruction underneath the roadshow is that ordinary small business admin is now a reasonable thing to hand to an assistant, and the firms doing it are collecting hours rather than miracles.

Take the exercise and leave the enrolment. Name three jobs, rehearse one of them properly, keep the wording that worked, and check in a month whether the week feels shorter. It works the same in Ashford as it did along the Mother Road. If you would rather somebody else ran that hour, that is what we do.