Ohio State helps small business owners leverage AI tools

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Ohio State helps small business owners leverage AI tools

New courses designed for entrepreneurs at all skill levels

As part of The Ohio State University's AI Fluency Initiative, the university is launching several new courses to help small business owners master the fundamentals of AI.

Starting this year, the initiative will embed AI education into the undergraduate curriculum, preparing students to use AI tools as well as understand, question and innovate with them.

Building on this broader effort to advance AI education and application, including beyond its campuses, Ohio State is offering AI courses for small business owners that include "Intro to Generative AI," "AI for Customer Success" and "AI for Marketing."

The courses are designed to help small business owners learn strategies to harness the technology to increase efficiency, said Jessica Phillips, senior director of Professional and Continuing Education in the Office of Academic Affairs.

"AI has been transformational and we're now at a place where small businesses have a really significant opportunity to maximize their impact and their success by leveraging AI," she said.

Forty percent of businesses are currently leveraging AI for marketing and sales growth, according to the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council (SBE Council).

"Most small businesses don't have large marketing teams or large IT or customer service teams," Phillips said. "You're sort of doing the best that you can to support your customers, your partners and your clients, and to do it in a way that is effective and efficient because you're working with maybe not an infinite amount of resources."

Ninety-one percent of small business owners say AI tools are essential to their competitiveness, according to the SBE Council.

"There's this major opportunity to take advantage of artificial intelligence to make processes more streamlined, to essentially make it as if you have a large team doing some of these core operations of a small business," Phillips said. "As a small business owner, this is the way to help you compete with other small businesses, with large corporations, and to grow, and to more effectively connect with your audience."

The courses are geared to participants with different experience levels using AI, from those who have experimented with it to those who have never used it at all, Phillips said.

"We recognize that not every small business owner has an IT background or has experience with artificial intelligence. What we've done is frontload the beginning of this pathway with a course for people who don't have experience with AI," she said.

"It's an introduction to generative AI for the more nontechnical learner or someone who's just curious about how it could be taken advantage of in their profession. This is a great place to start if you are a small business owner with limited experience with AI."

Ohio State's Fisher College of BusinessExecutive Education unit also offers several on-campus workshops and online courses for business owners and working professionals, including:

· "AI-Enabled Marketing"

· "Generative AI and the Future of Supply Chain"

· "AI Prompt Engineering"

· "Leading Change in the Age of AI"

· "AI-Enabled Sales"

"This effort to help support small businesses is a modern expression of our land-grant mission as a university," Phillips said. "This is the way that we're supporting the learners, the businesses, the startups in Ohio and beyond. My team, in particular - the Professional and Continuing Education team - we are working across the institution to help elevate and advance continuing education to better support the workforce of Ohio, our alumni and beyond."

For more information and to register for the new AI courses, visit go.osu.edu/learnAI. To learn more about the Fisher Executive Education course, visit go.osu.edu/ExecEd.

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