Initiative Context
Baton Rouge is about as AI-curious as any city in the country right now. When Anthropic ran its road show, the strongest registration response on the whole tour reportedly came from right here. And Baton Rouge certainly isn’t alone. For the first time, perhaps ever, small, scrappy business owners the world over are dealing with the same nagging question;
“I know AI represents opportunity, but what does that opportunity mean to MY business, and where do I start?”
As the world moves from being a business community in it’s infancy with AI to being AI integrated, shepherding that transition by teaching, sharing, and guiding is what this initiative represents.
Audience / Market Snapshot
Small and mid-sized business owners and operators are the micro-engines of the economy, changes to their quality of life directly impact local economies at the grassroots level.
The AI-narrative for SMB is nothing like what’s playing out in big enterprise.
The headlines for AI integration at the enterprise level are all about cutting headcount to hack growth on the balance sheet, but a small business team typically can’t afford to lose ANY of it’s team members who are actively engaged in the work they do, day in and day out.
We believe that the AI Opportunity for Small to Medium size businesses is two fold:
- 1Efficiency creation by streamlining and automating operations
- 2Leveraging this newly liberated internal expertise to apply it to new market challenges, so as to better compete with bigger, less nimble teams.
Brand Positioning
A rising tide raises all ships.
This is a community that runs on the open-source spirit. When Louisiana businesses win, we all win. The offer to business owners is simple,
“integrating AI into your business operations frees up more time, more capacity, and more room for the human parts of the work.
Our events and the learning track presented on the website are a jumping off point for you to begin your journey into building an Operating System for your business that optimizes how the work gets done.”
Organizing Principles
Context is the whole game.
AI with bad context is worse than a bad employee. With rich, specific context, it’s a different tool entirely. So adoption has to happen inside each person’s real work, this is the essence of practitioner led change.
The hump is smaller than it looks, and most of it is in your head.
The first and most difficult barrier to entry is taking the first step. Getting a business from 0 to 1 means facilitating a transition from chatting with AI in a browser to throwing your day-to-day work at AI in an integrated and secure way.
There’s no silver bullet.
You don’t “install AI” and wake up optimized. Working with AI is a series of cycles, full of dips and nooks and operational uncertainty. Every time you run a piece of real work through AI inside good guardrails, that curve gets a little smoother. Do it enough and the day gets more dependable, because everything you touch is captured in one place you can talk to. When you commit to the work it takes to get AI integrated, each success builds on the one before it and compounds the longer you work it.