Small Business Partner (SBP) Launches AI Training Campaign for Michigan SMEs

Small Business Partner (SBP) Launches AI Training Campaign for Michigan SMEs

MICHIGAN, MI, UNITED STATES, August 18, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Small Business Partner LLC today announced the launch of “AI for Small Business: Practical Training for Michigan SMEs,” a statewide training campaign built to give Michigan small businesses a practical, guided way into artificial intelligence. The campaign is SBP’s lead offering and its public entry point, ahead of any single product or tool.

The company will present the campaign to members of the Michigan Chamber of Commerce this week, alongside a limited first cohort of Michigan businesses onboarded personally by the SBP team.

Every small business we work with is being told to adopt AI, and almost none of them are being told how. We looked at that gap and decided the right way for SBP to show up in Michigan is not with a product demo, but with training people can actually use on Monday morning. Everything else we do, the advisory work, the funding support, the mentorship, is built to follow that, not lead it.

Adetunji Oni, MD/CEO, Small Business Partner LLC

Training first, because adoption alone is not the problem

Artificial intelligence has moved quickly out of technology companies and into everyday business operations: customer service, marketing, research, forecasting and day to day decisions. The ability to benefit from it has not spread evenly.

Large corporations have technology teams, budgets and data specialists, and can afford to experiment and be wrong. A nine-person clinic cannot. It has to work out on its own which tools matter, implement them without help, and find out afterwards whether the money was well spent.

Research published by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce found that 58 percent of small businesses used generative AI in 2025, up from 40 percent in 2024 and 23 percent in 2023, which the Chamber describes as the fastest technology uptake it has tracked since social media. Adoption is no longer the open question. Whether it produces anything is, and that is a training and judgment problem before it is a software problem.

A large company never misses a call, never sends a client the wrong quote, never lets an employee put sensitive data into a tool nobody vetted. A small business does all three, and not because the people running it do not care. It is because nobody had the hour to sit down and learn the tools properly, let alone teach the team. We are not leading with a product. We are leading with the hour nobody had.

Christian Sunday, Chief Technology Officer, Small Business Partner LLC

The campaign: five practical entry points

“AI for Small Business: Practical Training for Michigan SMEs” is built around five sub-campaigns, each aimed at a different role inside a small business rather than a one-size-fits-all course:

• AI for Front Desk and Admin Teams: Practical training for the people answering phones, booking appointments and handling first contact with customers, including where AI tools can help and where they should not be trusted unsupervised.

• AI for Managers: Training for the people running day to day operations: how to evaluate AI tools, set guardrails for a team, and separate genuine time savings from hype.

• AI for CEOs and Business Owners: Strategic training for owners: where AI changes competitive position, how to budget for it, and how to make adoption decisions without a technology background.

• AI Readiness Assessment for Small Businesses: A structured assessment of where a business stands today, its data, tools and team, before it spends money on any AI implementation.

• Responsible AI Use for Small Teams: Practical guidance on data privacy, accuracy and disclosure, so small teams can adopt AI without exposing customers or the business to unnecessary risk.

Each sub-campaign is designed to be delivered on its own, so a chamber, association or individual business can start with the one that matches where they are, rather than committing to a full program up front.

Why training, not a product, leads

New AI platforms arrive every week, and for an owner already managing sales, staff, customers and cash, working out which of them matters is a job in itself. SBP built the campaign around the belief that most small businesses do not yet need another tool; they need a clear, honest way to work out what they need, in what order, and how to use it responsibly.

That is also why the Michigan Chamber of Commerce and other chambers can promote the campaign directly: it asks nothing of a member business beyond showing up to learn, with no product commitment attached to participation.

A chamber can put its name behind training. It is a much harder thing to put its name behind a single vendor’s product. We built the campaign so the first conversation with any business, or any chamber, is about capability, not about what we sell.

Christian Sunday, Chief Technology Officer, Small Business Partner LLC

What sits behind the training

The training campaign is the market-facing entry point. Behind it sits the broader work SBP does with small businesses: advisory support, funding navigation, mentorship, competitive and market intelligence, and hands-on digital transformation work.

That broader work includes Front Desk, an AI employee built for small businesses that answers every call, WhatsApp message and web chat, books the appointment, captures the lead, and hands the conversation to a person when a question needs one. Front Desk runs on the phone number, calendar and customer records a business already uses, answers only from a knowledge base the business owns and edits, and is designed to be live inside ten working days. It starts with no write access, queues anything irreversible for a person, records every call and message word for word, and gives the business a switch that routes new calls straight back to its own team. Asked directly whether it is a person, it says that it is not and offers to put the caller through, a behaviour that is not configurable, by the customer or by SBP.

SBP treats Front Desk as the natural next step for a business that has been through the training and decided a specific tool fits, not as the reason to talk to

SBP in the first place.

Availability

The training campaign launches now to businesses and chambers across Michigan, with a limited first cohort onboarded personally by the SBP team. Priority sectors include medical and dental practices, law and accounting firms, real estate agencies, trades and home services. Businesses can arrange a session, or a demonstration of Front Desk answering a live call, through sbpsme.ai.

About Small Business Partner LLC

Small Business Partner LLC is an advisory firm working with American small businesses on AI training and coaching, competitive and market analysis, funding navigation and mentorship, and the developer of SBP Workforce Front Desk. The company is registered in the State of Michigan, is a Microsoft Partner and an AWS Partner, and is a member of the Michigan Chamber of Commerce. It is based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Adetunji Oni
Small Business Partner
+1 616-820-9935
email us here

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