Friday, September 18, I’ll be speaking at Afrofest Tech Day in Golden Valley, Minnesota.
I’m looking forward to joining other technology leaders, entrepreneurs, professionals, and members of the community for a day focused on innovation, technology, and opportunity.
My session is titled “AI The Bigger Picture”
AI continues to dominate conversations across nearly every industry. New models, tools, agents, copilots, and platforms seem to launch every week. For business leaders, that can make it difficult to separate what is genuinely useful from what is simply the latest trend.
That is exactly what I want to address in this session.
Rather than focusing on futuristic predictions, I’ll talk about how businesses can use AI right now. The goal is to make AI practical and approachable, especially for organizations trying to understand where it can actually create business value.
Understanding the AI Landscape
We’ll start by breaking down the current AI landscape in plain English.
There are general-purpose AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Copilot, along with specialized tools for writing, research, software development, images, video, automation, and enterprise workflows. One of the key messages from the session is that businesses do not need to adopt every new AI product that appears.
In many cases, the best place to start is with the technology your organization already uses.
AI is increasingly being built directly into tools such as Microsoft 365, Excel, Outlook, QuickBooks, Salesforce, Google Workspace, Slack, Confluence, and other business platforms. For many organizations, their first meaningful AI use case may not require purchasing an entirely new platform at all.
From Using AI to Building With AI
I’m also going to spend some time on vibe coding.
Vibe coding is changing who can build software. Instead of starting with programming languages and writing every line of code manually, people can increasingly describe what they want in natural language and work with AI to generate a functioning application. I will be speaking about Dala for the first time a Vibe Coding platform built by Gebeya. It can be found here: https://dala.gebeya.com.
During the session, I’ll share an example from my own work where I needed a utility to help migrate business data from Square to Odoo. Rather than searching for an existing product or spending days building something from scratch, I used AI to help create the tool, pushed it to GitHub, and deployed it within a very short period of time.
That is where I think things get especially interesting for entrepreneurs and small businesses.
AI is not only helping us write emails or summarize documents. It is beginning to lower the barrier between having an idea for a tool and actually building it.
Where Is Your Business on the AI Journey?
Another topic I’ll cover is the progression businesses typically go through as they adopt AI.
That journey can start with simple tasks such as rewriting emails and drafting content. From there, AI begins helping with more sophisticated work such as proposals, forecasting, analysis, strategy, customer onboarding, and eventually complex workflows that operate with significantly more autonomy.
Not every company needs to jump directly to autonomous AI agents.
The more important question is:
Where can AI remove friction, save time, improve decisions, or create something that would have been difficult to build before?
That is the conversation I hope attendees leave thinking about.
See You at Afrofest Tech Day
I’m excited to be part of Afrofest Tech Day and to connect with people from across the Twin Cities technology and business community. it will be at Brookview:
If you’re attending, come say hello. I’m looking forward to sharing some practical examples, learning from the other speakers, and having some good conversations about where AI is actually taking business.
Session: AI for Business Without the Hype
Speaker: Steve Buchanan
Date: Friday, September 18
Location: 316 Brookview Pkwy S
Golden Valley, MN
Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/afro-fest-mn-tech-day-tickets-1994631777340?
See you at Afrofest Tech Day.
