There is a lot of money being charged right now for things you can get for nothing. This is one of them, and I would rather tell you than sell you a class.
I keep getting asked some version of "should I be doing something with AI?" by contractors and restaurant owners. The honest answer is that you should start by taking the free training, because the companies that build these tools are handing it out to small businesses right now and it is better than most of what is being sold.
Google launched an AI Professional Certificate and is giving every U.S. small business free access to it, plus three months of Google AI Pro. It is being distributed through ADP, PayPal, Verizon and Walmart, so there is a decent chance you already have a path to it through a service you pay for. Under ten hours, with hands-on activities rather than lectures.
OpenAI Academy runs free ChatGPT for Small Businesses sessions, including in-person ones, with a track built specifically for restaurants, shops, salons and service providers. Not a generic tutorial, actual small business workflows.
Your local SBDC and SCORE chapter run free AI workshops. These are the least flashy and often the most useful, because the person running it has met your kind of business before.
Because you would find out. There is a whole industry right now selling "AI for small business" classes at a few hundred dollars that teach you to download the app and write a prompt. That content is free, from the companies that made the tools, this month. Charging for it would be taking advantage of somebody not knowing where to look.
It also would not work. Small businesses are not spending much on AI and they are right not to. In one 2026 survey of 942 U.S. small businesses, a third spend nothing at all on AI tools and only about one in ten spends more than $250 a month. The most common reasons given were not trusting the accuracy and worrying about data, both ahead of cost.
It teaches you the tool. It does not touch your business.
A free course can show you how to write a prompt. It cannot look at the last forty quotes you sent and figure out which parts you rewrite every single time. It cannot sit with your review inbox and work out a reply style that sounds like you rather than like a robot. It does not know that your busy season is May or that half your customers text in Spanish.
That gap is the only part worth paying anybody for, and it is worth paying for only after you have done the free part. Take the class first. Come back when you have a specific thing you do fifty times a month that you are tired of doing.
If you get to step four and want a hand, that is a real conversation and I am happy to have it. If you get to step three and decide it is not worth it, that is a completely valid outcome and you spent nothing to find out.
More posts on the blog. If you want to know whether Google and AI assistants can currently find your business, there is a free ten minute check. Every price is on the pricing page.
I will look at it and tell you what I find, free, whether or not you hire me.
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