Civic AI Access Lab: apprentice-delivered AI training for small business owners

Most digital equity programs run a workshop and leave. The Civic AI Access Lab is built on what we learned delivering AI training for the City of Boston’s Office of Economic Opportunity and Inclusion: business owners benefit most when they work on their own problems, with someone beside them, and leave with something working.

So the program is an eight-session sequence per cohort, delivered in the neighborhoods themselves at Roxbury Community College, BCYF centers, and community sites. Every owner starts with an intake and a workflow audit. Then they build: automated marketing, scheduling, customer management, documentation, whatever their business actually needs, using tools they can afford and keep. A dedicated session covers cybersecurity and fraud, because a business that adopts AI without it is more exposed, not less. The program closes with a micro-credential and a 30-day sustainment plan.

The people doing the coaching are Loop Lab apprentices, young adults from the same four neighborhoods, trained and credentialed by the lab as Digital Navigators and supervised by an experienced curriculum lead. That is the design constraint and the point: technology in service of the community, at a scale the community can own.

The Hope Group, through Equity Intelligence LLC, designs the curriculum, oversees facilitation and quality, and issues the micro-credentials, drawing on the same model the City already contracts us to deliver. Outreach and materials are multilingual (English, Spanish, and Haitian Creole), and the program prioritizes income-eligible owners. Developed with The Loop Lab for the City of Boston’s 2026 Digital Equity Fund, with Roxbury Community College and TechBoston Academy as partners.

One number from the model it scales: a Dorchester restaurant owner who went through the OEOI program cut her weekly administrative work by seven hours after two sessions. She did not attend a digital equity workshop. She sat down with someone who understood her business and built something real with her.