Small businesses
A working system, built to the owner’s budget. No cash outlay. A donation is requested only if the work lands. A supervised technical review before anything can run.
SDSU teams, inside San Diego businesses.
Fowler College of Business is placing student teams inside San Diego small businesses for one semester this fall. Two or three students map the shop, propose one build scoped to the owner’s budget, build it, take a technical and business review, and hand off a working solution. Not a recommendation deck. The owner decides whether to run it. The Fall 2026 pilot is five to seven businesses and ten teams.
Local businesses can’t put AI to work. Students can’t prove they can.
Goldman Sachs found that 77 percent of small businesses struggle to identify applicable AI use cases. Most have no one in-house to choose the tool, let alone ship it.
Goldman Sachs small business survey, 2026.
“AI-fluent and unemployable at the same time.”
The missing layer is trust: someone who will sit with an owner, map what the business actually does, and then build the smallest thing that works.
One semester. One build. The owner decides.
Teams embed in one existing San Diego small business. Nothing ships without a technical and business review.
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Map the business
The team sits with the owner and maps what the shop actually does. Opportunities are ranked by value. Nothing is built yet.
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Propose one build
One proposal, scoped to the owner’s real budget — tools they can afford to keep running.
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Build it
The team builds that one thing, with weekly check-ins alongside the owner and program mentors.
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Technical and business review
Internal technical review first. Then the business reviews. Nothing reaches production without both.
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Hand off
A working solution. Deploy, start small, or decline. Declining is an acceptable outcome. The owner decides whether to run it.
Deployment, not a deck. Inside shops that already exist.
- Not the AI4Business Research Lab.
- That is funded research in data mining and machine learning. This is deployment, not publication.
- Not ZIP Launchpad.
- That incubates student startups. This places students inside businesses that already exist, already have customers, and already have a need.
- Not a consulting practicum.
- The deliverable is not a recommendation deck. It is a working solution the owner decides whether to run.
A working system. A named owner. County impact.
Students
A named owner and a live deployment. A portfolio artifact and a LinkedIn recommendation from the business. Small-team work that has been reviewed, not a class demo.
SDSU
Visible county economic impact, on the Fowler mission. Students who leave with applied work and local contacts.
The ask is not money.
Brand, faculty access, students, and a room. Permission to run the pilot under SDSU and Fowler naming is what gets an owner to take the meeting.
Host a team.
San Diego small-business owners, Fall 2026. Students: join a team.