Helping small businesses put AI to work

OpenAI has announced a partnership with America’s SBDC, the national network of small business development centers, to expand hands-on AI training and local support for small businesses. In the initial phase through OpenAI Academy’s Community Trainer Program, the organizations plan to train approximately 150 SBDC advisors and host hands-on workshops across the country, aiming to reach at least 1,000 small businesses through in-person training alongside one-on-one advising and newly developed resources. The pilot will combine training and credentialing for local advisors, hands-on local workshops using a three-hour format, and practical guides shaped by business needs covering topics such as marketing, operations, manufacturing, exporting, and government contracting. Alongside the partnership, OpenAI released a new report titled Small Businesses, Bigger Capabilities. The report examines how owners and small teams use AI and notes that during a single recent week from September 9-15, approximately 4 million employees at companies with fewer than 500 people worldwide used OpenAI’s tools. Nearly one in five of those users worked at businesses with fewer than 10 employees. Furthermore, the report highlights that agentic output tokens for products like ChatGPT Work and Codex made up two-thirds of small business output tokens in August, up from one-third in April 2026. Small business users heavily leveraged AI for finance and accounting, supply chain, legal and compliance, and marketing compared to larger-business users. Real-world examples in the report demonstrate how small business owners use AI to handle tasks such as comparing competitor menu prices and researching school districts for tailored outreach, illustrating the practical applications the new SBDC partnership seeks to scale.