AI Lab

What Is AI Lab?

AI Lab is a monthly Business Bridge gathering where we learn one useful AI trick, tool, or prompt — and then actually use it to get something done.

More than half of small-business owners in the U.S. now say AI is essential to their growth, and marketers report it's one of the clearest ways smaller brands can compete with bigger ones. That's the whole reason this exists: not to chase a trend, but to actually learn it, together, in real time.

Each session starts with a short lesson — one tool, one prompt, one technique, something genuinely useful. Then we spend the rest of the evening working on our own projects side by side: comparing notes, helping each other, and troubleshooting when the robots get weird. It's part mini-class, part co-working session, part group experiment conducted under the strictest possible scientific conditions — laptops, business professionals, and roughly 40 flavors of La Croix.

Bring a laptop or tablet and something real to work on: an email, a social post, an event you're planning, a process that's never quite worked, a spreadsheet, or the task that's been sitting at the bottom of your to-do list for months. No AI expertise required, and nobody here is pretending to know everything. We're learning by trying things, occasionally making a mess of them, and asking ChatGPT or Claude why it suddenly sounds so confident about something it clearly made up.

Below, you'll find what we've worked on each month — the tools, prompts, and templates from every AI Lab session, whether you made it that night or not.

July 29, 2026

For our first AI Lab, we used ChatGPT and Claude to score and strengthen our Google Business Profiles — the listing that shows up whenever someone searches your business by name. That listing is now what Google's AI reads to decide who to recommend when someone asks something like “who's a good [business type] near me,” so grab the toolkit below and run the same audit on your own.

This one came up as a bonus in discussion — a simple way to get a process that only lives in your head onto paper, whether it's a sales pitch, an onboarding step, or something you handle from memory every time you do it. If you didn't get to try it during the session, it's worth running on your own.

The prompt (put this on screen or a handout):

“I handle [X] in my business, but it's never been written down — it just lives in my head. Interview me about it, one question at a time, until you understand it well enough to write it up. Then turn what you learn into a [checklist / script / email template] I can actually use starting tomorrow.”