In plain English
- What happened
- On September 30, 2026, OpenAI announced a partnership with America's SBDC, the national network of Small Business Development Centers, to train about 150 local advisors and run hands-on workshops aimed at reaching at least 1,000 small businesses through in-person training. Alongside the announcement, OpenAI released a report finding that roughly 4 million employees at small firms worldwide used its tools during the week of September 9-15, 2026.
- Why it matters to your business
- For an owner without an in-house AI person, this puts training in the hands of local SBDC advisors who already help with business plans and loans, rather than leaving owners to sort through vendor marketing alone. The report's finding that small businesses lean more heavily on AI for finance, legal and compliance work than larger companies do points to specific tasks worth testing first if a team has no dedicated specialist on staff.
- Do this
- Check whether your local Small Business Development Center is part of the pilot and ask what workshops or guidance they have scheduled before signing up for an outside AI consultant.
America's SBDC serves around 1 million entrepreneurs a year through its network of local centers. Under the new arrangement, OpenAI's Academy program will select and train advisors from that network, with a goal of having at least one Academy Workshop at each participating center.
What the SBDC partnership covers
Advisors who go through the training are meant to help owners pick a useful starting point for AI, use it responsibly, and judge whether it is actually helping their business. Some advisors and staff will also train to lead group sessions through a separate facilitator track built around a small-business workshop module.
The workshops themselves are modeled on OpenAI Academy's existing three-hour, hands-on format, where owners build and test uses of ChatGPT against real tasks from their own business and leave with a plan for using it afterward. SBDC advisors are expected to follow up with attendees to work through questions and see what sticks.
OpenAI and America's SBDC also plan to publish practical guides to putting AI to work, plus at least one industry-specific companion guide. Potential topics mentioned include marketing, operations, manufacturing, exporting and government contracting, shaped by what comes out of the workshops.
What the usage report found
The accompanying report, titled Small Businesses, Bigger Capabilities, draws on OpenAI's own usage data. Nearly one in five of the roughly 4 million small-firm employees using OpenAI's tools in that September week worked at a business with fewer than 10 employees.
In the week of September 9-15, 2026, about 4 million employees at companies with fewer than 500 people used OpenAI's tools, according to OpenAI's own report.
The report also tracks a shift toward agentic tokens, the units a model processes and generates when it is carrying out a task rather than just answering a question. For products like ChatGPT Work and Codex, agentic output tokens made up two-thirds of all small-business output tokens in August 2026, up from one-third in April 2026.
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| April 2026 | Agentic output tokens are about one-third of small-business output tokens |
| July 2026 | OpenAI introduces its ChatGPT for small business program |
| August 2026 | Agentic output tokens rise to about two-thirds of small-business output tokens |
| September 30, 2026 | OpenAI announces America's SBDC partnership and publishes the usage report |
According to the report, small-business users directed a notably larger share of their AI interactions toward finance and accounting, supply chain, legal and compliance, and marketing work than users at larger companies did, at least three times as large in each category. These are areas where a small team is more likely to be working without a dedicated specialist on staff.
Reality check
Both the training program and the usage report come from OpenAI, the vendor whose tools are being promoted, so the examples and numbers describe how its own products are being used rather than an independent comparison across AI tools. The stories attached to the report, like a restaurant group comparing menu prices or an owner booking a training session after outreach, are useful as examples of what to try, not as a guarantee of similar results for any given business.
- 1
Find your local SBDC
Search the America's SBDC directory to see whether your regional center is part of this pilot before assuming it is.
- 2
Ask what's scheduled
Call or email the center directly to ask whether an Academy Workshop or advisor training has a date set in your area.
- 3
Check the free resources first
Look at OpenAI's existing small-business tools and resources page before paying for outside AI consulting, since some of the planned guides may cover the same ground.
Sources
