Part Two

The 2026 landscape.

In July 2026, the space is dominated by a handful of frontier models and a rapidly-improving mid-tier. Two implications for small businesses: (1) You almost never need the frontier model for production workflows. (2) The cost curve has already made agents economically viable for tasks that were laughable in 2023.

The small-business pattern for model choice:

• Haiku 4.5 for anything classification-shaped: categorize this email, extract these fields, label this transaction. Cheapest, fastest, reliable when the task is well-defined. Roughly 90% of production LLM calls in a good workflow.
• Sonnet 4.6 for drafting content a human will send: emails to clients, summaries of documents, drafts of proposals. Best judgment-to-cost ratio. Roughly 9%.
• Opus 4.6 for reasoning-heavy tasks where quality is the entire product: legal analysis, complex strategic memos. Roughly 1%.

Route requests to the model that matches the task. Don’t route everything to Opus and don’t route everything to Haiku. This routing is the single biggest lever on your monthly bill.