openai plans chatgpt workshops at small business development centers

At a glance

In short: OpenAI and America's SBDC plan to train about 150 advisors and run ChatGPT workshops. The announcement doesn't name which local centers will take part.
Why now: OpenAI announced the partnership on September 30 and describes it as an initial phase of a pilot, with no workshop dates given.
Still open: Which SBDC networks will host the first workshops?
Will a center in the Coachella Valley or the Inland Empire take part?

September 30, 2026 · Sat Singh · Coachella Valley

Source: OpenAI (article, September 30, 2026)

OpenAI wants to teach ChatGPT to the people small-business owners already go to for advice.

On September 30 it announced a partnership with America’s SBDC, the national network of small business development centers. The plan, as OpenAI describes it: train around 150 SBDC advisors, hold hands-on workshops with at least one at each participating network, and reach at least 1,000 small businesses in person, plus more through one-on-one advising. The workshops follow OpenAI Academy’s three-hour format, where owners try ChatGPT on real tasks and leave with a plan.

A report came with it. OpenAI says in that report that about 4 million employees of companies with fewer than 500 people used its products in one week in September. One example it gives: Ted and Tami Taylor, who run three restaurants in New Mexico, used ChatGPT Work to compare competitors’ menu prices before changing their own, and avoided increases that would have priced some items out of reach. Those are OpenAI’s figures and stories, and we haven’t checked them.

Why here?

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Not verified by us

Every figure and story here is OpenAI's own, from its announcement and its new report, Small Businesses, Bigger Capabilities. We read the announcement but not the report, and we have checked none of it independently.
The announcement does not name which SBDC networks will take part, so we do not know whether a center in the Coachella Valley or the Inland Empire is among them, and we have not asked the centers here.
The announcement gives no workshop dates and does not say whether workshops cost anything. The word free appears nowhere on the page.
The OpenAI page could not be archived: the Wayback Machine returned a 520 error on every attempt, and no earlier capture exists. The text was read on September 30 in the in-app browser.

How this was made: researched and written at the desk with AI, every figure checked against the source; edited independently by a second model; published by Sat Singh on September 30, 2026.