The Long Island Lens: Fifty Small Businesses Are Testing This Idea Right Now

The Force Multiplier series, part I

A particularly relevant experiment is taking place here on Long Island. The Long Island Association and Stony Brook University have created the LIA-AI Growth Academy for 50 local businesses with 20 or fewer employees. Rather than simply introducing business owners to the latest AI tools, the program is designed around practical adoption by helping participants identify actual business problems, determine where artificial intelligence may be useful and implement the technology in ways that make economic sense.

The size of the participating companies is what makes the program especially interesting from a force-multiplier perspective. A twelve-person Long Island business cannot realistically hire a market researcher, copywriter, data analyst, CRM specialist and administrative assistant merely because each of those capabilities would improve the business. Until recently, smaller companies simply had to accept that certain functions were beyond their economic reach or rely on employees wearing several hats, often outside their areas of real expertise.

Artificial intelligence changes at least part of that equation. It does not transform twelve employees into 100, and it certainly does not eliminate the need for people who understand the business and exercise sound judgment. Used intelligently, however, it can help a smaller team conduct competitive research faster, analyze information, create preliminary drafts, automate repetitive processes, personalize communications and spend more of its time on activities where human relationships, creativity and experience create greater value.

This leads to a much more useful question than the generic one many businesses are currently asking about AI. Instead of beginning with, “How can we use artificial intelligence?” a business should begin by asking what it wishes it were capable of doing that it cannot economically do today. The answer might involve AI, but it might just as easily involve a fractional executive, an outside specialist, a partnership, a better process or some combination of all four.

That is why programs like the LIA-AI Growth Academy are worth watching. The most consequential AI story for Long Island’s small-business community may ultimately have less to do with the novelty of the technology than with whether it allows locally owned companies to close some of the capability gap separating them from much larger competitors.