Notes on Handing Fire to the Non-Technical
It was one of those routine days at work when I found my colleague Dr. Darlene Deberry lost in thought, staring outside the window, just beside her cubicle. Winter is long gone, and the spring blossoms are still trying to cling to the winter’s chill, in a last desperate attempt.
Inquisitive to the core, I volunteered to break the trance, Darlene was under and asked what she was working on.
She smiled, “How to teach the benefits of AI to a non-technical cohort.”
I knew instantly why she was in one of her pondering moods – we have been helping small, medium businesses achieve better results in our own ways of communicating, coordinating, and calibrating with a vision to match market standards, and it was all traditional so long. The ways of the old world have not been deemed obsolete yet, despite an insurgence of modern tools and an inexplicable love for artificial intelligence.
Historians claim Fire to be the most important discovery of the modern world. It goes without saying, in a few years, they will look at artificial intelligence as the most important invention. To introduce the ‘new fire’, that has been taking over the recent Time will require a push, irrespective of how beneficial it has been portrayed to the world so far.
We have always remembered that Change is the only constant.
But have we ardently followed it?
I started working with Darlene in a multi-faceted approach. The AI for Small & Rural Businesses (Non-Technical) Cohort was built to demystify AI for small business use. She already had notes, modules, and a primary structure for building a robust AI cohort model.
I worked to organize and refine the existing tools and give a conspicuous shape to them. Ten modules shortened to eight, covering all the need-to-know information starting from how to leverage AI in marketing/brand growth, to how ethical its usage is. As I started putting up more meat into the bones, our collective efforts were successful, bringing in enough people from small/medium businesses, CDCs, banks, community organizations to form a cohort. I remember doing some of that myself, as I reached out to community organizations across the Eastern Seaboard and the Midwest. Our reach was intentional, mission gripping, and speckled with a zeal to give back to the community to help it function better, with more ‘fire.’
Words of mouth poured in, and we managed to put up a 48-member cohort. The AI usage among the participants has been varied: some of them have used AI before, some use it rigorously, whereas some have been skeptical so far to proceed. Our free, virtual workshop training requires no significant investment, other than time, and the members are happy to attend. As I collected their industries and their intent for the ‘Know your Mates’ booklet, dedicated to giving a shout out to the participants, I was surprised. We have representatives from 7 states across the country, from students straight out of their undergrads to established businessmen with 40 years of experience, from someone running a consulting gig to help people achieve results in the insurance world, to someone owning a premium barbeque sauce business.
What a beautiful, inclusive blend of people! We launched on June 17 with AI Fundamentals. The momentum continues to build – to satiate the overwhelming positive response and the desire to know their fellow mates better, we formed a WhatsApp group for the participants to get to know each other better beyond the stipulated workshop hours. We followed up every session with a feedback survey to understand the pulse of the audience. There were a couple of suggestions which we worked on, and our sessions only became better and more helpful to everyone.
I often look upon my work as an analyst as that of a bard. I draft what goes on around me, find solutions, and sing them out to help our cause. I realize it is all about working with people on the court, understanding their perceptions and thoughts, and trying to co-create a world where everyone from very different backgrounds comes together and lends a hand.
In the end, we are nothing but a combination and culmination of the thoughts and ideas from around us that have helped shape us so far – and kept the ‘fire’ in us alive.
Prometheus gave fire and was chained to a rock for it: the price of handing the gods’ possession to ordinary hands. We paid no such price. What we handed over cost us nothing but our personal conviction that AI tools for very small enterprises should be placed within reach, a month of late nights and a willingness to knock on doors. And yet the arithmetic is the same in the part that matters: the fire, once given, is no longer ours to keep. It belongs now to a barbeque-sauce maker in one state, a fresh graduate in another, forty-eight people who will carry it into rooms we will never enter. That is the whole of it. You steal the flame not to hold it, but to watch it leave your hands.
