Goldman Sachs announced on Thursday that it has launched the Small Business AI Institute as part of a $500 million expansion of its 10,000 Small Businesses programme, which is geared toward educating and supporting entrepreneurs. The bank said it would partner with Google, Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta to provide AI training and tools to entrepreneurs.
The $500 million commitment will fund the next chapter of 10,000 Small Businesses. It will deliver education, access to capital and support services to another 10,000 businesses.
THREE PILLARS AND EARLY ACTIVITIES
The Institute will focus on three pillars: delivering AI education to small business owners across the country, publishing research on AI use by small businesses, and supporting AI-enabled expansions of access to capital.
Its initial activities include a new learning series with Anthropic on applied AI for small businesses and hands-on workshops for 10,000 Small Businesses alumni. The Institute will also pursue research collaborations on small business AI use.
WHAT EACH TECHNOLOGY PARTNER CONTRIBUTES
The Institute will work with Google to deliver its Grow with Google AI Professional certificate to almost 20,000 small business owners and their employees. The offer includes three months of no-cost access to Google AI Pro.
Meta will collaborate with the Institute to support entrepreneurs with AI tools and training through Muse for Small Business. The Institute is also partnering with OpenAI to deliver tailored AI workshops across the country with 10,000 Small Businesses community college partners.
ADOPTION OUTPACES INTEGRATION AMONG ALUMNI
A survey this year of more than 2,400 graduates of the programme found that 86% of respondents were using AI in their businesses, up from 56% in 2024. Yet only 15% said they had fully integrated AI into their core operations, according to Goldman.
A separate Goldman survey of 1,256 programme participants, published on 17 March, found that 73% wanted more training and implementation resources. In that survey, 93% of AI users reported a positive business impact and 84% cited efficiency and productivity gains, although these were self-reported outcomes.
PROGRAMME RECORD AND THE WIDER AI BACKDROP
Since its launch in 2010, nearly 20,000 entrepreneurs across all 50 states and four US territories have completed the programme. Graduates add jobs four times faster than similarly sized US businesses and together represent more than $32 billion in annual revenue and over 350,000 jobs.
Goldman and other big firms are counting on small businesses, which make up more than 90% of all US companies and drive most of the country's job growth, to buy in. The bank's share price has approximately tripled over the past three years while AI-related companies pushed the stock market to record highs. Goldman helped lead the record-breaking initial public offering for Elon Musk's SpaceX and is reportedly working on the offering of Anthropic, the startup behind Claude.
A recent NBC News poll found that 79% of respondents believe the government is not doing enough to regulate AI use. Sixty-seven percent disapprove of how President Donald Trump is handling the technology.
In July, a swarm of about 700 AI agents created by OpenAI hacked into the open-source platform Hugging Face. Google has said Chinese hackers are using AI to automate their attacks. After spending on AI tokens exploded in the past year, companies from Uber to Microsoft to Meta have taken steps to limit or re-evaluate how employees use AI compute power.
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