OpenAI plans workshops for 1,000 small businesses to help them adopt AI

Businesses will work through their own tasks in ChatGPT during three-hour sessions, then receive help from advisers.

OpenAI and America's SBDC plan to train 150 advisers and hold in-person sessions for at least 1,000 small businesses.

The partnership, announced on Sep 30, will add practical AI training to the work of local business support centers in the US. Each participating SBDC network will hold at least one workshop based on OpenAI Academy's three-hour session format. Participants will work through real tasks in ChatGPT and create an implementation plan, then advisers will help them continue the work.

You can get started on your own. OpenAI offers a 23-page PDF workbook: upload it to ChatGPT Work and paste in the ready-made prompt from page 19. The chat will help you choose and test one useful business process. For in-person help, you can find a local SBDC by ZIP code or US state: the centers offer free business advice and training at cost.

Small teams are already moving from conversations with AI to agentic tasks. According to OpenAI's Sep 30 data, these tasks accounted for a third of small businesses' output tokens in April and two thirds in August. The count includes ChatGPT Work and Codex. During the week of Sep 9–15, 4 million employees at companies with fewer than 500 people used OpenAI products; nearly one in five worked on a team of fewer than 10 people.

From request to code. At Goliath Data, salespeople describe problems, ChatGPT Work suggests code changes and engineers review them. In an OpenAI Academy case study dated Aug 14, the company reported an increase from a few fixes to hundreds per week.

At the same company, Zach Fitch got a school district filter from ChatGPT Work in about a day. Goliath Data estimated the compute cost at $40, and after the demo, the client requested a contract worth $10,000 per month.

Tom Tomaszewski uses the Codex AI agent to develop and maintain freddy.coach. In an OpenAI Academy case study dated Aug 28, he said the two-person team serves 5,000 users and has reached break-even.

Teri Moten used ChatGPT Work to research school districts and prepare targeted outreach emails. According to her account in OpenAI's Sep 30 article, an order for paid training came in 10 days after she began sending the emails.

After the workshops, participants will be able to continue implementation with help from local SBDC advisers.

OpenAI plans workshops for 1,000 small businesses to help them adopt AI

Businesses will work through their own tasks in ChatGPT during three-hour sessions, then receive help from advisers.

OpenAI and America's SBDC plan to train 150 advisers and hold in-person sessions for at least 1,000 small businesses.

Tom Tomaszewski uses the Codex AI agent to develop and maintain freddy.coach. In an OpenAI Academy case study dated Aug 28, he said the two-person team serves 5,000 users and has reached break-even.

After the workshops, participants will be able to continue implementation with help from local SBDC advisers.