Helping 1,000 small businesses build with AI

OpenAI wants to prove that its tools aren't just for coders in San Francisco. The company just announced a partnership with DoorDash, the small-business mentoring nonprofit SCORE, and a handful of local organizations to run something called the Small Business AI Jam, aimed at getting 1,000 small business owners actually building with AI rather than just hearing about it.

This isn't a webinar series. The program is built around hands-on sessions where owners of restaurants, salons, repair shops, and other Main Street businesses sit down and use AI tools to solve real problems they already have, things like managing inventory, writing marketing copy, or handling customer questions faster. DoorDash's involvement makes sense given how many of its merchants are exactly the kind of small operators who don't have a data science team on staff, or honestly, any tech staff at all.

SCORE brings decades of experience mentoring small business owners, which matters here because the gap isn't usually a lack of curiosity about AI. It's a lack of time and a lack of someone showing them which tool actually fits their specific headache. A bakery owner doesn't need a general lecture on large language models; they need to know how to automate their weekend order forms in twenty minutes.

The bet OpenAI is making is that small businesses adopting AI at scale becomes a bigger economic story than any single flagship product launch. Reach 1,000 business owners with practical skills, and some meaningful chunk of them stick with it, tell other owners, and the tools spread through word of mouth in a way that no ad campaign could match.