Every Day Is a New Use Case
Almost 60 percent of business owners are using generative AI. “It’s essentially my CFO,” said the owner of Heritage Hospitality Group in Chicago.
Here are today’s highlights:
If Liz Picarazzi has to pay tariffs, she’d like to see the money support local manufacturing.
Thanks to its confusing regulations, Boston may be the toughest city in the country in which to open a restaurant.
Since 2018, Quince has been churning out copycat products that now produce $1.1 billion a year in revenue.
On the 21 Hats Podcast: Do ESOPs really turn employees into employee owners?
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Smaller businesses keep finding new ways to use generative AI: “Mike Salvatore, owner of Heritage Hospitality Group in Chicago, used to run reports once or twice a year on the cost of goods for the two cafes, two bars and the bike shop he owns. He would spend hours crunching potential price adjustments manually, based on the expense of raw materials. Now, he does it every three weeks with the help of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Salvatore, who is 44 years old, also feeds information from both his point-of-sale system and from bookkeeping service QuickBooks into Google’s NotebookLM AI tool. The system makes a podcast about how the business is faring and how it could improve, which he shares with managers. ‘It’s essentially my CFO,’ Salvatore said of AI. ‘Every day is a new use case.’”
“An August report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce found that 58 percent of some 3,800 small businesses surveyed said they use generative AI. That is up from 40 percent in 2024 and more than double what it was two years prior. Restaurants are using AI to schedule worker shifts. Event planners use it to make seating arrangements and provide quotes. Interior designers are using image-generation tools to visualize color changes or room layouts.”
“At the Story of Ramen, a cooking school in San Francisco, owner Manville Chan, 53, has AI serving as a customer-service representative. The school gets inbound emails from customers at all hours. Responding to them is a lot of work but not enough to justify hiring an admin. About a year ago, Chan started experimenting with AI drafting emails and marketing materials, including blog posts and social-media content. The end goal was to have the technology respond to every customer inquiry.”
“Gemini, which Chan deemed better at interpretation, would read incoming emails to evaluate customer needs. ChatGPT, the more natural-sounding writer, would draft the replies. For months, Chan had to manually review all the AI responses. He frequently caught hallucinations. Once a customer asked if the school would travel and host a class at their house: The school doesn’t do house calls but AI drafted a reply saying it would. ‘There’s a lot of common questions that people ask but once in a while people ask some weird questions that are not coded in the system yet,’ says Chan. ‘If they don’t know the answer, they will invent something.’”
“At Thread Logic, a custom-embroidered apparel firm located in a Minneapolis suburb, a young employee used AI to update the company website. The team wanted to reorganize information about each product, but the hosting platform had a set template that didn’t allow those changes. ‘AI wrote the code for us and told us where to put it, and it worked,’ said owner Jeff Taxdahl, 61. ‘Five years ago, if we wanted to do this, it would have meant hiring a developer.’” READ MORE
