OpenAI Partners With America's SBDC to Train Small Businesses on AI

OpenAI is partnering with America's SBDC, the national network of small business development centers that serves 1 million entrepreneurs each year, to train advisors and bring hands-on AI workshops to small businesses across the United States. The company announced the initiative alongside a new report, Small Businesses, Bigger Capabilities, which found that roughly 4 million employees at small firms worldwide used OpenAI's tools in a single recent week, from September 9–15.

The partnership is OpenAI's most direct attempt yet to push AI adoption through the local advisors that small business owners already trust. For a company racing to expand its user base beyond tech-forward enterprises, the roughly 33 million small businesses in the American economy represent a largely untapped market — one where adoption barriers are less about cost and more about knowing where to start.

Training advisors first

In the initial phase, OpenAI plans to train around 150 Small Business Development Center advisors through its OpenAI Academy Community Trainer Program. The goal is to reach at least 1,000 small businesses through in-person training, with many more reached through one-on-one advising and jointly developed resources.

"A trusted advisor can make that first step easier," OpenAI said in its announcement, acknowledging that while AI can extend a small team's capacity, "figuring out where to start takes time too."

The pilot has three components.

First, America's SBDC will select small business advisors for an OpenAI Academy training and credentialing pathway focused on helping small businesses apply AI. The idea is to combine SBDC's community expertise and advisor relationships with AI tools, equipping advisors to help owners choose a useful starting point, use AI responsibly, and assess whether it is actually helping their business. Advisors and staff will also prepare to lead group sessions through a separate facilitator pathway and a small-business workshop module.

Second, OpenAI and SBDC networks will host Academy Workshops, with at least one at each participating network. Modeled on OpenAI Academy's three-hour, hands-on format, these sessions are designed to help owners build and test ways to use ChatGPT on real business tasks and leave with a plan for putting those tools into practice. SBDC advisors will follow up afterward to help owners work through questions and see what is proving useful.

Third, the two organizations will create practical guides to putting AI to work, including one companion guide focused on specific industries, distributed across OpenAI Academy and America's SBDC channels. Potential topics include marketing, operations, manufacturing, exporting, and government contracting. The guides will reflect what the partners learn from workshops and advising sessions.

The usage numbers behind the push

The report released with the announcement grounds the partnership in usage data. In a recent week in September, approximately 4 million employees at companies with fewer than 500 people used OpenAI's products. Nearly one in five of those users worked at a business with fewer than 10 employees.

The more striking shift is in how small businesses are using the tools. In August, agentic output tokens for products like ChatGPT Work and Codex — the units that AI models process and generate — made up two-thirds of all small business output tokens, up from just one-third in April 2026. That doubling in five months signals that small firms are moving from conversational queries toward delegated, multi-step work.

The tasks driving that shift are telling. In the report's sample, finance and accounting, supply chain, legal and compliance, and marketing each accounted for at least three times as large a share of small-business users' interactions with AI agents as they did for larger-business users. OpenAI frames this as a structural pattern: these are areas where a small team may need help without having a dedicated specialist on staff.

Owners describe the results

The report pairs its usage data with owner accounts, two of which OpenAI highlighted.

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. Ted says they would otherwise have skipped the comparison entirely.

Teri Moten used ChatGPT Work to research school districts in South Texas and prepare tailored outreach that she reviewed and sent herself. She reports booking a paid training session within ten days of starting that outreach.

Both examples follow the same shape: AI doing time-intensive research and analysis that a small team would plausibly skip, with a human reviewing and acting on the output. OpenAI presents them as "concrete starting points for owners considering how AI might fit into their own work."

A widening small business effort

The SBDC partnership is the latest in a series of OpenAI initiatives aimed at small firms. Last November, OpenAI Academy teamed up with DoorDash, SCORE, and local business organizations for Small Business AI Jams in five U.S. cities, giving owners hands-on help with tasks such as marketing, customer communications, and everyday operations. In July 2026, the company introduced its ChatGPT for small business program, which added training and resources to help owners use AI at work.

The common thread across these programs is distribution through intermediaries. Rather than selling directly to owners, OpenAI is working through organizations — DoorDash, SCORE, and now America's SBDC — that already have relationships with small businesses in their communities. The SBDC network, with its 1 million-entrepreneur reach and credentialed advisor model, is the largest of those channels to date.

Throughout the pilot, OpenAI says it will follow up with owners to understand what is helping, what they are still using, and where they need more support. What the company learns will shape the training and resources the two organizations develop together.

The stakes run in both directions. For small businesses, the question is whether AI can genuinely substitute for specialist functions — legal review, financial analysis, supply chain management — that small teams have historically gone without. For OpenAI, the pilot is a test of whether trusted local intermediaries can convert the 4 million small-firm employees already using its tools into a durable, deeply embedded customer base. If the SBDC model works, expect OpenAI to scale it through similar advisor networks — and expect competitors pursuing the same segment to take note of whether credentialing local advisors, not advertising, turns out to be the unlock.