Join us for a practical working session with data scientist Barb Donnini on how small businesses are using AI automation today.

AI has been talked about relentlessly for the past few years, and most of that conversation has been either hype or jargon. This session skips both. Instead, we’ll look at the ordinary, repetitive work that quietly eats hours inside a small business — answering the same phone questions, following up with people who inquired months ago, asking customers for reviews, chasing paperwork — and examine which of those tasks can now be handled automatically, which can’t, and how to tell the difference.

We’ll cover:
The most common places automation shows up in a small business — phone and customer inquiries, follow-up with past customers and leads, review and reputation workflows, and one-off processes specific to your business
How to audit your own operation for tasks that are good candidates
How to evaluate whether a task is actually worth automating — volume, repeatability, and the cost of getting it wrong
What this realistically costs and what the return looks like, using real numbers from real implementations
Where AI doesn’t work well, and the situations where automating would be a mistake
This is meant to be interactive. Bring a real process from your business — something tedious, something that keeps breaking, or something you’ve wondered about — and we’ll talk through it together on the spot. We’ll also run live demonstrations of the technology so you can see how it actually behaves, including where it falls short.

You’ll leave with a framework for evaluating automation opportunities in your own business and a realistic sense of what’s achievable at a small business scale.

Presenter: Barb Donnini

Barb Donnini is the President and Founder of Boxplot, a data analytics and AI automation consultancy she has led since 2015. She holds dual degrees in Applied Statistics and Economics and has 10 years of experience in the field.

Over the past decade, Barb has worked with organizations across healthcare, education, nonprofit, and government — including Penn Medicine, Project HOME, Instructure, and the State of Alaska — building the data infrastructure, reporting systems, analytics, and automations that leadership teams rely on to make decisions. In recent years, that work has expanded into AI automations: designing systems that handle the repetitive, time-consuming processes small and mid-sized businesses would otherwise pay a person to do by hand.

Barb likes to garden and lives in the Philadelphia area with her husband and two children.