Description

Welcome to Small Business University
The Chamber's small business seminar series offering a fresh opportunity to learn, connect, and grow! Each session will feature expert insights from fellow Chamber members, offering valuable tools, tips, and resources on a wide range of topics to help your business thrive. Whether you're just starting out or looking to level up, these engaging, information-packed workshops are designed with your success in mind.

Hands-On AI Hackathon for Small Business
Join us for a hands-on AI workshop built for small business owners who want practical ways to use today’s tools to improve growth, sharpen customer focus, and create stronger business concepts.  Prior experience with AI is not required, but more experienced participants will be given extra challenges when they finish the basic workstream.

In this guided working session, participants will use AI to build a customer profile, generate product, service, and customer engagement opportunities, select the strongest ideas, create a persuasive story for a concept, and turn that concept into a clear visual asset. Faster participants may also extend their work into a presentation or a simple website concept.

This is a practical workshop. Attendees should bring a laptop (a smartphone or tablet will NOT work), come ready to work on one specific product or service that would benefit from increased sales, and have access to a paid version of a frontier AI model such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or Claude. Participants will also be asked to register for the free versions of Gamma.app, NotebookLM, and Lovable.dev.

We will also briefly address AI risks and practical considerations as part of the session.

Core Working Sequence

• Create a customer profile
• Generate product, service, and customer engagement opportunities
• Select the best ideas
• Create a persuasive story for the new concept
• Create an infographic
• Optional: create a presentation
• Optional: respond to a skeptical board
• Optional: vibe-code a website

Presented by:

Michael Doane

Michael Doane is a growth strategist, business consultant, and revenue leader with more than 15 years of experience driving commercial growth across startups, private equity, and enterprise environments. A former Amphibious Reconnaissance Marine and team leader, he brings a mission-driven, high-accountability approach to strategy, sales, and execution. His background spans go-to-market design, revenue operations, business development, commercialization strategy, and AI-enabled growth systems. Across roles in benefits technology, media, logistics, private equity, and emerging technology ventures, he has built scalable sales engines, launched new revenue lines, improved pipeline performance, and helped organizations turn complex opportunities into measurable outcomes.
 

David Robertson

David Robertson teaches AI-driven Innovation at the MIT Sloan School of Management and is the Faculty Director for Sloan’s largest executive education program, the Executive Program in General Management. Prior to MIT, he was a Professor at the Wharton School and from 2002 through 2010 was the LEGO Professor of Innovation at IMD. He is the author of award-winning books including Brick by Brick and The Power of Little Ideas, and has been recognized as a Thinkers50 thought leader. He brings deep experience in helping leaders apply innovation and AI in practical business settings.