OpenAI, DoorDash bet 1,000 small businesses can learn AI in a day

OpenAI is taking its tools to Main Street. The company launched the Small Business AI Jam on Thursday, a multi-city workshop designed to get over 1,000 small business owners actually building with AI instead of just reading about it. They’re not doing it alone, either. DoorDash, SCORE, and a handful of local organizations are co-hosting events in San Francisco, New York, Houston, Detroit, and Miami, creating a kind of hands-on boot camp for the businesses that usually get left behind when new tech rolls out.

The crowd is about as Main Street as it gets: roughly 20% are restaurants, caterers, and food trucks, another 20% are professional services like accountants and lawyers, and the rest are a mix of retailers, salons, and local repair shops. It’s a deliberate cross-section of the economy that rarely has the time or resources to experiment with a tool like ChatGPT. Each participant works directly with an OpenAI mentor to build something tailored to their business—drafting marketing copy, streamlining customer emails, or cleaning up inventory lists. The goal is for everyone to leave with at least one ready-to-use tool.

There’s a real hunger for this. A survey commissioned by OpenAI found that half of small business owners say AI comfort is important for their employees, and 60% expect meaningful efficiency gains from workers who possess those skills. Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s Chief Global Affairs Officer, framed it bluntly: “This is about making sure that the little guy has the tools needed to compete with larger enterprises… so they can get their fair piece of the economic pie.” DoorDash’s Elizabeth Jarvis-Shean echoed that, calling small business ownership “equal parts craft, creativity, and chaos” and positioning AI as a way to tilt the balance back toward the craft.

The program doesn’t end when the day does. Attendees get access to an online resource hub beforehand and join a community afterward to keep iterating on what they built. For those who can’t get to one of the five cities, a virtual Jam is scheduled for December 4. It’s a smart hedge: the in-person events generate energy and press, but the online version could quietly become the more scalable piece of this. If even a fraction of these business owners integrate AI into their daily workflow, it’s a signal that the productivity boost isn’t just for the Fortune 500.