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There’s a lot of hype right now about AI “agents” that can just go off and do real work for you, log into your accounts, complete tasks, come back when it’s done.
We decided to actually test that claim properly, using our own sample WordPress site as a real-world task: log in, and draft a couple of blog posts.
It did not go the way the marketing suggests.
“Smart home” used to mean a handful of coloured light bulbs and a voice assistant that mostly understood you.
In 2026 it means
And, they are all expected to talk to each other, ideally without locking you into just one brand forever.
We took a look at how Eufy’s ecosystem actually compares to Google Home (Nest), and then zoomed right in on one of Eufy’s most talked-about products this year, the E25 robot vacuum and mop.
The honest answer here is that neither is simply “better,” they’re built around different priorities:
Google Home (Nest) is the more deeply integrated ecosystem if you’re already living in Google’s world. Thousands of third-party devices carry the “Works with Google Home” badge, and Google has embraced Matter and Thread across its Nest hubs, which makes mixing and matching brands genuinely easier than it used to be. Google Nest cameras plug straight into that ecosystem for live streaming, notifications and household sharing, all in the one app.
Eufy takes a different approach, built heavily around local storage and lower ongoing costs rather than cloud subscriptions. Most Eufy cameras store footage locally on their own HomeBase hub instead of requiring a monthly cloud plan, and the range of camera types and price points is broader than Nest’s lineup. The trade-off: Eufy cameras can be added to Google Home for voice control and automations, but they currently can’t live-stream video inside the Google Home app itself, you’ll still want the Eufy Security app for that.
The general rule of thumb: choose Google Home if you’re already deep in Google’s ecosystem and want cloud convenience; choose Eufy if avoiding subscriptions and keeping footage stored locally matters more to you. Thanks to Matter, a growing number of devices from either camp will now at least talk to a shared hub, but voice routines, automations and app polish are still ecosystem-specific.
This is where Eufy has been getting a lot of attention this year. The E25 HydroJet is a genuinely premium all-in-one robot vacuum and mop, and the specs explain why:
It’s not perfect. Independent reviewers consistently note two real weaknesses: the roller mop is better suited to daily maintenance than deep, set-in stains, and the raised laser navigation turret on top can occasionally get the robot stuck under low furniture like bed frames or low sofas.
The robot vacuum and mop category is more competitive than ever in 2026, and the E25 sits right in the thick of it:
The realistic takeaway: the E25 competes well on raw cleaning power and hands-off maintenance, but if mopping deeply soiled floors or navigating very low furniture is your top priority, it’s worth cross-shopping against a Dreame or Roborock model at a similar price before committing.
Robot vacuum pricing moves around constantly between these three retailers thanks to ongoing promotions, gift-card deals and price-match policies, but here’s a snapshot of where things stood at time of writing:
| Model | JB Hi-Fi | Harvey Norman | The Good Guys | Suction | Standout feature |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Eufy E25 Omni HydroJet | ~$895 | ~$896–948 | ~$896 | 20,000 Pa | Self-washing, self-drying, detergent-dispensing Omni dock |
| Dreame L40 Ultra VE | Check current price | $798 (55% off RRP) | Check current price | 25,000 Pa | 80°C hot water mop wash + 4cm extending mop reach |
| iRobot Roomba Plus 505 Combo | Check current price | $694 | Check current price | Not officially rated in Pa | AutoWash Dock with ClearView Pro LiDAR + AI obstacle mapping |
| Roborock Qrevo Curv 2 Flow | ~$1,799 (RRP; frequently discounted to $1,300–1,500) | ~$1,799 (RRP) | ~$1,799 (RRP; frequently discounted) | 20,000 Pa | Slimmest premium profile (3.14″), best-in-class app and multi-floor mapping |
A few honest caveats on this table: all three retailers regularly run gift-card offers, “Perks” pricing, and price-match policies against each other, so the actual price you’re quoted in-store or at checkout can sit noticeably below the figures above. The Roborock Qrevo Curv 2 Flow is genuinely a tier above the other three on price, it’s included here because it’s the most commonly recommended “if budget isn’t the main constraint” alternative, not because it’s a direct apples-to-apples price match with the E25.
Whether you land on Eufy, Google Nest, or a mix of both (which, thanks to Matter, is increasingly realistic), the same principle applies to a smart home as it does to any other piece of technology in your business or household: work out what actually matters to you first, subscription-free local storage, deepest ecosystem integration, or raw cleaning performance, and choose the brand that matches that priority, rather than chasing whichever product has the biggest spec sheet.
Pricing, specs and comparisons are current at time of writing and change quickly in this category, always check the current listing on the manufacturer’s own site before purchasing.
Wall-mounted family calendars have had a real moment lately, JB Hi-Fi now stocks Skylight in-store, “smart calendar” ads are everywhere, and everyone’s trying to solve the same problem: too many family commitments living in too many different apps.
We had a close look at three products that keep coming up in the same conversation, Skylight, Frameo, and the eufy E10, and one of them turned out to be a genuinely different product to what most people assume.
We recently went through Mailchimp’s SMS sign-up flow (it’s owned by Intuit these days) and hit a screen worth flagging for anyone doing digital and SMS marketing: a recommended 1,000 SMS credits for A$28.16 a month, with higher tiers running all the way up to 20,000 credits for around A$197.
It’s presented as a simple subscription choice, pick your tier, add your card, done.
But the detail that matters is easy to miss on that screen: these are recurring monthly subscription credits, and unused credits don’t roll over.
Most businesses would be thrilled with a 20% email open rate. We just looked at the stats on one of our automated welcome emails for our free payroll training sample, and the numbers stopped us in our tracks:
For context, the average email marketing open rate across most industries sits somewhere between 20% and 35%, and a “good” click-through rate is usually anywhere from 2% to 5%.
We didn’t just beat those numbers, we roughly tripled the open rate benchmark and blew past the click-through benchmark by a factor of ten or more.
So what’s actually going on here?
You may have seen the headlines this week: OpenAI’s own AI agents “hacked” the platform Hugging Face, coordinated with each other in secret, and then tried to cover their tracks.
It sounds like science fiction. It’s real, it happened in July 2026, and both OpenAI and a set of independent researchers (METR and Redwood Research) have now published detailed reports on exactly what went on.
It’s worth understanding properly, because the lesson underneath it applies to any business starting to hand real tasks over to AI.
If you’ve seen people talking about “Grok Bot” lately and assumed it was just another chatbot, it’s worth a proper look, because it’s a genuinely different kind of product to the AI chat windows most of us are used to.
Grok Bot launched in beta in mid-August 2026, built by xAI (now trading as SpaceXAI following SpaceX’s acquisition of the company earlier in the year) in partnership with Cursor, the AI coding company.
It installs as a proper desktop app on Windows or Mac (plus an iPhone companion app), and it’s designed to behave less like a chatbot you talk to, and more like a colleague you hand tasks off to – an employee!
Meta has agreed to pay up to $US18 billion ($23.6 billion AUD) and roll out a new set of child-safety features across Facebook and Instagram, settling a landmark case brought by nearly every US state over claims the platforms were deliberately designed to be addictive to teenagers.
The deal came together right before Mark Zuckerberg was due to take the stand in a California courtroom, and it’s one of the largest consumer protection settlements in US history.
This is bad news for Meta but can your business benefit by understanding what users want to see on social media?
Temu has built its entire reputation on one promise: the same kind of thing you’d buy elsewhere, for a fraction of the price. And honestly?
Sometimes that promise is true. But “sometimes” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and the only way to know if you’re getting a genuine bargain or a false economy is to actually dig into the listing properly, not just glance at the price tag.
We decided to put that to the test with a genuinely popular product: solar festoon lights for the backyard. We compared the Hoselink Warm White Solar Festoon Lights Starter Set, a well reviewed Australian favourite, against a similar looking listing from a Temu seller called SUN YEE.
We got an email this week from Revolut, the newer deposit-taking neobank operating in Australia, and it’s worth talking about, not because it’s unusual, but because it’s a textbook example of a marketing message that sounds harmless and is actually a pretty terrible financial idea for most people.
The pitch was simple: apply for a personal loan of up to $50,000, comparison rates from 6.99%, terms of 1 to 7 years, approved and deposited into your account “instantly.”
Every now and then a story comes along that’s a perfect, real-world case study for the exact thing we teach in our marketing and strategy courses. This week it’s milk.
A small family dairy just outside Sydney has gone viral, and we mean genuinely viral, hundreds of people queuing in freezing temperatures, some for over an hour, just for a bottle of unhomogenised Jersey milk.
If you’ve used Microsoft Publisher for flyers, newsletters, business cards or that one perfect letterhead template, we’ve got a bit of news for you: Microsoft is officially retiring Publisher on 13 October 2026.
After that date it’ll be pulled from Microsoft 365 subscriptions entirely, and while older standalone versions might keep limping along, they won’t get security updates or support.
We know a few of our students and clients still reach for Publisher out of habit, so we wanted to put together a quick “bye bye Publisher, hello again Word and PowerPoint” guide, because the good news is Microsoft has been quietly building most of Publisher’s best bits into the apps you’re probably already using every day.
If you’ve ever added a pop-up form to your website promising a discount code or a free guide in exchange for someone’s email address, you’ve probably run into the same problem we did: the enquiry lands in your inbox, gets buried under fifty other emails, and by the time you get around to replying, the prospect has forgotten they even signed up.
Or worse — your confirmation email never reaches them at all, because it’s sitting in their spam folder.
We see this a lot with students who are setting up their first pop-up or landing page as part of their Digital Marketing Training.
A basic contact form plugin might look like it’s doing the job, but it’s really just moving the same manual, disorganised process from your shopfront to your website.
If you want your pop-up form to actually grow your business, it needs to talk to a proper CRM or email marketing system — not just your inbox.
Most website pop-up plugins do one of two things: they email you the details, or they store them in a spreadsheet you have to remember to check. Neither option:
That’s the gap a CRM or email marketing platform closes.
When a pop-up form emails a plain “thank you” message from your website’s server, it often hasn’t been authenticated properly, and mail providers like Gmail and Outlook are quick to flag it as spam or bulk mail.
It also means every subscriber gets exactly the same message, whether they were interested in your Xero course or your MYOB course.
A dedicated email marketing platform like Aweber, MailChimp or similar is built specifically to be trusted by inboxes.
It handles authentication properly, manages unsubscribes for you (which keeps your sender reputation clean), and lets you set up an automated confirmation sequence that actually lands where it’s supposed to — with the current promo code attached.
This is where a CRM or email system really earns its keep. Instead of one big pile of names, you can tag each subscriber based on which pop-up they signed up through, which page they were on, or which promo code they used. That means when someone joins your list from a page about Xero courses, they’re automatically grouped differently to someone who came in through a page about MYOB or Microsoft Office training.
From there you can send relevant follow-up content instead of one generic newsletter to everyone — which is a big part of what we cover in our Email Marketing Communications Training Course (912), where we go through audiences, campaigns and reporting using MailChimp (with a look at alternatives like Aweber too).
Here’s something we talked about in a previous post: not all customers are ideal customers. The same is true of pop-up form subscribers. A CRM lets you see, at a glance, who’s genuinely likely to become a good client and who’s just curious.
Before you even build the pop-up, it’s worth being clear on what your ideal client actually looks like — their budget, the kind of course or service they need, and how ready they are to buy. Our Sales & Marketing Success Strategy course walks through exactly this: defining your ideal client and packaging your offer so the right people put their hand up, rather than trying to be everything to everyone.
We covered the essentials of a high-converting landing page in a previous post about what your landing page should contain, and a lot of the same principles apply to a pop-up:
If you’re using WordPress (which most of our students are), your pop-up plugin should feed straight into your CRM or email marketing platform — not sit there as an island collecting names nobody follows up on. Once that connection is in place, you can automatically deliver your promo code, tag the subscriber by interest, and start a follow-up sequence that speaks to what they actually signed up for.
If you want to see how all the pieces — website tools, customer relationship management and digital marketing — fit together for a small business, our Online Tools & Digital Business Course is a good place to start, and it pairs well with the email marketing and ideal-client courses linked above.
Want help setting up your pop-up form, CRM tagging and automated email sequence? Get in touch with our team or browse our full range of courses at marketingacademy.com.au.
We’ve been rolling out AI-assisted customer service across a few of our own websites lately, and it’s given us a pretty clear, real-world lesson: the AI isn’t the hard part. The knowledge behind it is.
Take two of our own sites as an example. On computertrainingonline.com.au, our AI chat agent handles pre-sales questions about our Xero, MYOB, QuickBooks and Microsoft Office courses with genuine confidence, it gives specific, accurate answers about course access, certificates, payment plans, support channels, and more. Over on natbooks.com.au, our National Bookkeeping site, the same kind of AI-assisted chat doesn’t have nearly as much to work with, and it shows.
Same underlying AI technology. Very different quality of answer. Here’s why.
The reason our computertrainingonline.com.au chat agent performs so well is our FAQ’s page, and we don’t say that lightly. It’s not a token “top 5 questions” page. It’s a genuinely thorough, 30-question resource covering everything from course duration and certificates, to payment plans, refund policy, support channels, CPD points, and even how insurers and rehab consultants can enrol clients.
That page didn’t happen by accident. It’s been built up and refined since 2011 by actually paying attention to the questions our students and prospective students ask, then writing clear, specific, honest answers to them.
When you feed an AI system that kind of detailed, well-organised, first-hand knowledge, it has something real to work with. It’s not guessing or generalising, it’s answering the way one of our own team would, because it’s essentially drawing on the same accumulated knowledge our support team has built over more than a decade.
This is a pattern we expect to see everywhere as more businesses experiment with AI chat agents: the AI is only ever as good as what you give it to work with.
A generic AI chatbot with no grounding in your actual business will happily make things up, or fall back on vague, unhelpful answers. But an AI system trained on a genuinely detailed FAQ, your policies, your course structures, your actual support history, starts to sound like it actually knows your business. Because, in a very real sense, it does.
This is exactly the kind of thing we’re exploring further on our AI in Marketing, Sales and Customer Service page, where we go into more detail on how tools like Claude can be set up with custom knowledge, instructions and integrations so they genuinely reflect how a business works, rather than giving generic, one-size-fits-all answers.
If you’re a business owner thinking about adding AI to your customer service, sales or marketing, don’t start with the AI. Start with your knowledge base.
Sit down and write out, honestly and specifically, the questions your customers actually ask you, the ones your team answers over and over on email, phone and website chat, and answer them properly. That FAQ page, or knowledge base, or set of support documents, is what turns a generic AI chatbot into something that actually sounds like your business.
We did it the slow way over more than a decade on computertrainingonline.com.au, and it’s paying off now in a way we didn’t originally plan for.
Want to know more about how AI can be trained to work the way your business works? Read our AI in Marketing, Sales and Customer Service page, or get in touch, we’re happy to talk through what we’ve learned.
If you’ve ever typed out almost the same reply to a customer for the third time in one morning, you already know the problem we’re solving today. It’s one of the most common questions we get asked by our office admin and customer service students: “How do I stop rewriting the same email over and over?”
The answer is Outlook email templates, and once you’ve set one up, you’ll wonder how you survived without it.
We talk to a lot of small business owners and office admin staff, and email templates come up constantly, usually right after someone has spent their lunch break rewriting a refund policy explanation for the fifth time that week.
Templates aren’t just a time-saver, though that’s reason enough. They also help you:
We covered a lot of this same ground, from setting expectations with customers to speeding up your response process, in our Online Customer Service Training Course article. Templates are really the practical, day-to-day version of that bigger customer service strategy.
To use it later: go to New Items > More Items > Choose Form, set the “Look In” dropdown to User Templates in File System, select your template, tweak the details for that customer, and send.
The newer versions of Outlook (and Outlook.com) use a slightly different system called My Templates:
Simple as that. No add-ons, no extra software, no line item that blows out your monthly budget.
If you’re not sure where to start, these are the ones we see used the most:
Keep each one written in plain English, keep the tone friendly rather than corporate, and always leave a gap where you can personalise the customer’s name and specific situation. Nobody likes a reply that clearly wasn’t written for them.
Email templates are just one small (very useful) corner of what Microsoft Outlook can do for office admin and customer service tasks, calendar management, contact and CRM tracking, and task lists are all in there too, and most people are only using a fraction of it.
If you want your whole team working faster and more consistently across the entire Microsoft Office suite, our Office Support & Administration using Microsoft Office course covers Outlook email and meeting management, contacts and CRM, and tasks, alongside practical Word and Excel skills your admin and customer service staff will use every single day.
Got a Microsoft Office, MYOB, Xero or QuickBooks question you’d like us to cover in a future post? Get in touch, we’re always keen to write about what our students actually want to know.
To increase leads, prospects, and customers for online bookkeeping courses in MYOB and Xero, your landing page should combine clear messaging, trust-building elements, and conversion-focused design.
Here’s a breakdown of what to include:
Example: “Master MYOB & Xero Bookkeeping — Get Certified and Boost Your Career or Business!”
It should instantly communicate the value of the course and who it’s for.
Example: “Learn practical bookkeeping skills using Australia’s most popular accounting tools — even if you’re starting from scratch.”
Use buttons like:
“Get Instant Access”
“Start Free Trial”
“Download Free Course Preview”
CTA should be repeated throughout the page.
Brief video (1–2 minutes) introducing the course, showing platform walk-throughs or testimonials.
Break down what students will learn and how it helps them (e.g. start a freelance business, get hired, manage small biz finances).
Use bullet points or icons to make it scannable:
✅ MYOB & Xero practical training
✅ Real-world bookkeeping scenarios
✅ Certificate of completion
✅ Lifetime access & updates
Include:
Student testimonials (video or text)
Logos of companies that hired graduates or where instructors worked
Star ratings from course platforms
Number of students enrolled (if impressive)
Offer a free resource to collect emails:
“Download our FREE MYOB vs Xero Comparison Guide”
“Try the first module for free”
“Free bookkeeping checklist for beginners”
List what’s included:
Modules
Quizzes & exercises
Templates
Support (e.g. Q&A, email help)
Certification details
Share the instructor’s experience, certifications, and real-world bookkeeping background.
Build trust by showing why you’re qualified to teach.
Use clear, simple pricing.
Highlight:
Payment plans
Discounts (limited-time offers)
Money-back guarantee
Address common objections like:
“Do I need accounting experience?”
“Is this accredited?”
“How long will it take?”
Show:
SSL secure checkout
Satisfaction guarantees
Accreditation or industry partnerships (if applicable)
Ensure the landing page looks great and is easy to navigate on mobile—many users will come from social media or email.
Offer a last-chance discount or lead magnet before they leave the page.
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