OpenAI announced a pilot partnership with America’s Small Business Development Centers (SBDC), the national network that serves about 1 million entrepreneurs each year, to help more small businesses adopt AI in their work. In the initial phase, OpenAI plans—via the OpenAI Academy Community Trainer Program—to train roughly 150 SBDC advisors and deliver hands-on workshops across participating SBDC networks. The pilot aims to reach at least 1,000 small businesses through in-person training and to support many more via one-on-one advising and jointly developed resources.
Structure of the pilot
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Training and credentialing advisors: America’s SBDC will select small business advisors to go through an OpenAI Academy training and credentialing pathway focused on applying AI in small businesses. The pathway combines SBDC’s local community expertise and trusted advisor relationships with AI tools to help advisors guide owners in choosing a useful starting point, using AI responsibly, and assessing its business impact. A separate facilitator pathway prepares advisors to lead group sessions and the small-business workshop module.
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Hands-on local workshops: OpenAI and SBDC networks plan to host Academy Workshops, with at least one workshop in each participating network. Modeled on OpenAI Academy’s three-hour, practical format, these sessions will let owners build and test ways to use ChatGPT on real business tasks and leave with an implementation plan. SBDC advisors will follow up after workshops to help owners work through questions and assess what proves useful.
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Resources shaped by business needs: together, OpenAI and America’s SBDC will create practical guides for applying AI and an industry-specific companion guide to be shared across OpenAI Academy and SBDC channels. Possible topics include marketing, operations, manufacturing, exporting, and government contracting. The materials will be informed by what the partners learn during workshops and advising.
Findings from the new report
OpenAI published a companion report, Small Businesses, Bigger Capabilities, that combines usage data and owner experiences to examine current small-business adoption of OpenAI tools. The report finds that during the week of September 9–15, 2026, roughly 4 million employees at firms with fewer than 500 people used OpenAI products worldwide. Nearly one in five of those users worked at companies with fewer than 10 employees.
The report also notes a shift in output composition: in August 2026, agentic output tokens for products such as ChatGPT Work and Codex—the processing and generation units of AI models—accounted for two-thirds of all small-business output tokens, up from one-third in April 2026.
Additionally, the analysis shows that small businesses are more likely than larger firms to direct AI interactions toward finance and accounting, supply chain, legal and compliance, and marketing. In the sample, each of these areas accounted for at least three times the share of small-business users’ interactions with AI agents compared with larger-business users—areas where small teams often lack dedicated specialists.
Practical examples from owners
The report includes several owner stories illustrating how AI is used in practice. Ted and Tami Taylor, who run three restaurants in New Mexico, used ChatGPT Work to compare competitors’ menu prices before updating their own; the analysis helped them avoid price increases that would have made some items uncompetitive. Teri Moten used ChatGPT Work to research school districts in South Texas and prepare tailored outreach, booking a paid training session within ten days of starting that outreach.
Other examples: Elizabeth Rider modeled pricing and user growth and worked through product and UX decisions for Butler, her meal-planning app built with three developers and a designer; Larissa Guetter uses ChatGPT Work to enable a two-person team to perform work that would otherwise require multiple employees; Allison Leeds organized research and developed weekly art cards with ChatGPT, turning the project into a small business; Goliath Data and freddy.coach use Codex and ChatGPT Work to convert customer requests into software features, monitor systems overnight, support product development, and handle administration as small teams expand.
Why this matters
The partnership links OpenAI’s practical training initiatives with America’s SBDC’s local business expertise and trusted relationships. By training advisors who already support owners in their communities, the pilot seeks to lower the barrier for owners to experiment with AI and incorporate it into everyday business tasks. Throughout the pilot, the partners will follow up with owners to understand what helps, what continues to be used, and where further support is needed—feedback that will shape future training and resources.
Small business owners and advisors can explore OpenAI’s small-business tools and resources or join upcoming webinars to hear directly from customers about how they use ChatGPT Work in day-to-day operations.
