DevRel Live education St. Louis · January 15, 2026

Giving local business owners a practical introduction to AI

I spoke to the Southwest Area Chamber's Business Builders group about current AI tools, where they are useful, and what changes when you move from experimenting with a chatbot to putting AI inside a real business process.

By Nate Haskins

Giving local business owners a practical introduction to AI — Live AI education · January 2026
I introduced a Chamber group to current AI tools, kept the first step approachable, and showed where the conversation goes when AI becomes part of a real workflow.

Nate Haskins giving a practical AI talk to Southwest Area Chamber business owners — January 15, 2026
I introduced the Business Builders group to practical AI tools, then showed how those tools connect to real business workflows.

Most people in the room did not need a tour of the AI industry. They needed a useful starting point: what these tools can do today, what is worth trying, and how to tell the difference between a novelty and something that can help their business.

Start with the tools people can actually try

I covered familiar models including ChatGPT and Grok, along with conversational voice tools. That gave everyone common ground. People could connect the discussion to products they had already heard about instead of starting with infrastructure, model architecture, or a wall of new terminology.

The goal was not to make the technology sound mysterious. It was to help local business owners form a practical mental model and leave with better questions than they arrived with.

Do not stop at prompting

The public chat interfaces are the easiest place to begin, but they are only the visible edge of the work. After the session, the conversation moved toward custom configuration, retrieval, and automation—ways AI can become part of an operating workflow rather than another tab someone occasionally opens.

That distinction matters to me. A good introduction should make the first experiment approachable without pretending the first experiment is the whole subject.

The room told me what landed

An attendee described the presentation as the kind of primer many local business owners needed. He specifically called out the overview of current models and voice tools, then wrote about our conversation afterward on deeper automation and implementation.

That is a useful outcome for an introductory talk. The audience leaves with enough understanding to participate, and the people ready for the next layer know where the conversation goes from there.

What I took from it

Match the technical depth to the room instead of delivering the same talk everywhere.
Use recognizable tools to establish common ground before introducing deeper implementation ideas.
Give people a realistic first step without shrinking the subject to basic prompting.
Leave room after the presentation for the questions that reveal what the audience actually wants to solve.

Primary sources

AI education · Technical speaking · Business automation More DevRel work →