Saturday, October 17, 2026
Last month, 50 Long Island small businesses gathered at Stony Brook University to finish something few of their owners would have imagined a year ago: six months of training in artificial intelligence.
The LIA-AI Growth Academy was free to participants. It was run by the Long Island Association’s foundation, funded by Google.org and taught by Stony Brook’s technology and A.I. experts, along with advisers from the Long Island Small Business Development Center. It was open only to companies with 20 or fewer employees, and graduates received a $5,000 grant to put A.I. to work in their businesses.
Long Island’s municipalities, chambers of commerce and educational institutions must find ways to replicate this terrific program.
The stakes are high, because A.I. is the first technology in a long time that can favor the little guy. For most of the last century, size was destiny. A big company could afford an IT department, in-house lawyers, a finance team and analysts poring over its data, and the corner store could not.
A.I. erases much of that advantage. A contractor can turn handwritten notes into clean estimates and keep three job sites on schedule. A hardware store can spot the items that are gathering dust and the ones that keep selling out. A two-lawyer firm can summarize a 200-page lease before lunch. Corporations spent millions of dollars on tools that now cost a small business a modest monthly subscription.
We know the objection, because we hear it from every owner we talk to: Who has the time? Small-business owners already work long weeks. They answer the phones, make payroll, chase invoices and sweep the floor. Adding “Learn A.I.” to that list sounds absurd.
But few things a business owner can do will pay off more than a few hours spent learning these tools. The time invested comes back every week — in invoices sent faster, schedules built in minutes and paperwork that no longer eats the weekend.
Owners don’t have to figure it out alone. The LIA should announce a second cohort, and we hope it’s much bigger. The Long Island SBDC at Stony Brook offers free one-on-one advising, and the state SBDC network now runs a dedicated A.I. program. In Nassau, Hofstra University’s Entrepreneurship Assistance Center has teamed up with the Valley Stream Chamber of Commerce on a series of practical A.I. workshops for local business owners, a model every chamber on Long Island should copy.
Hofstra’s ideaHUb incubator also connects young companies with mentors and student interns. Farmingdale State College has launched a bachelor’s degree in artificial intelligence that blends business and computer science, and Long Island University is building its own A.I. offerings. Nassau and Suffolk community colleges and our public libraries offer affordable continuing-education and tech classes. Business owners should use them.
A.I.’s promise doesn’t mean we should be naïve about its dangers. The same tools that help a bakery balance its books can write a convincing scam email or clone a child’s voice to con a grandparent. Bad actors are already using A.I. for fraud, impersonation and deepfakes. Any A.I. training should also teach owners how to protect themselves from these scams.
The bigger problems are not for the deli owner to solve. That job belongs to Albany and Washington. Lawmakers need to set clear rules: real penalties for A.I.-enabled fraud and impersonation, disclosure when content is A.I.-generated, transparency from the companies building these systems. A.I. will likely eliminate jobs — especially the entry-level clerical, customer-service and bookkeeping work that has started countless Long Island careers — so government budgets must account for retraining workers whose jobs change or disappear.
Embracing the technology and demanding guardrails are not contradictory. They are two halves of the same responsible approach.
A.I. is coming to Long Island’s economy whether Main Street is ready or not. The LIA, Hofstra and other local institutions have shown what readiness looks like. But they can’t train 100,000 Long Island small businesses on their own. That will take every town hall, chamber, library and college on the Island pulling in the same direction, and it needs to start now.
