“My name is Hai and I recently moved here to Centretown.
I work in AI and every day I interact a lot with Main Street business owners, whether they’re going to a shop or you know, grocery shopping.
And recently we decided to collaborate with the BIA of Centretown to run some events and hackathons on Bank Street to connect developers in AI with Main Street business owners.
So that the business owners will be exposed to what the tools are capable of nowadays and how much more they can do and how much less stress they can feel when running their business because we all know that entrepreneurship is hard, whether or not it’s Main Street or a tech company.
AI is really powerful when you connect it to different systems that you already have, whether or not it’s like a point of sale, your email, your calendar, your booking system.
So you can have something that can take care of at least like 50% of the incoming support requests from your customers or you know, something to delegate tasks to your team members.
If you have staff on site, maybe they’re pinning you all the time.
You can have a repository of knowledge so that people can ask that repository instead of you.
So that frees you up to either spend more time with your family, be less stressed, or do more if you’re more ambitious and you want to maybe expand the business or take on more clients or provide more services.
It’s quite simple, but I think the hurdle that most people run into in the beginning is like there’s so much information out there and they don’t know where to start.
But it’s just as simple as, and I tell people a lot, which is you just go into like a search engine or like a chat group and just ask “How do I automate my email?”
And from there, if you’re somebody who’s a high agency and you can ask a lot of good questions, follow up questions, then you can find your own way, but most people aren’t like that. So that’s why we’re here to help.
And we’re basically going to be providing knowledge support, and connecting developers with business owners so that they get exposure to how easy something can be set up.
I went to school to study film, so I’m kind of artistically oriented, but accidentally became a developer. I kind of like living between these two worlds where artists are seeing some effects of how AI is changing their lives and careers and how developers are building these systems and the truth lies somewhere in between where I can see what is actually possible today and what’s not, what’s hype.
So far I’ve just been talking to people when I go to events where I meet business owners around Centretown, asking them how they’re currently using AI.
Some of them are using AI a lot more than others, but a lot of people aren’t aware of what it’s capable of and there’s a lot of miscommunication, misinformation about where technology is today.
So in the new year, I’ll be doing workshops out of a few different spaces around Centretown.
So it’s a little bit different from like a typical business or startup podcast where like in Ottawa, for example, like we have names of business owners and founders that they have been on like a dozen podcasts already like but what I’m looking for are people, individuals, or companies that are up-and-coming that people haven’t heard about yet.
There are companies that are based out of Centretown that are serving millions and millions of data rows for Notion or this company called Cursor that not a lot of people know about.
They’re called “turbopuffer” and started by people who used to work at Shopify and now doing this and they’re killing it. And there are many other companies just like them. I want to put a spotlight on those people instead of the people that we all hear about constantly on social media.
We need to talk about Ottawa. We want to spotlight the new generation of founders.
I go to a lot of the Ottawa Design Club events to volunteer as a photographer. You might find me running around shooting photos with my Fujifilm camera, but if you need help with the AI stuff, I do work part-time as an AI advisor at Invest Ottawa.
So you can come to Invest Ottawa and ask to see me.
Or you’ll find me somewhere on Bank Street, maybe doing a workshop with business owners out here about how to use AI better.”
Hai Nghiem
AI Developer
@hais_photohub
Photos by our friend @_finn
