While major corporations announce mass layoffs tied to artificial intelligence adoption, small businesses and nonprofits across New York City are using the technology to enhance their operations without eliminating positions.
Holly Diamond is leveraging AI to improve the menu and streamline hiring at her family’s Korean barbecue restaurant in Flatiron, which she describes as a “hole in the wall” run by her parents who speak limited English. Meanwhile, Welcome to Chinatown, a Bowery-based nonprofit focused on economic development and cultural preservation, has transformed its community surveying process using AI tools.
“It’s often easy to hear all the negative impacts of AI, but what we actually see is that it has greatly enhanced our capacity, which means we can actually spend more time interacting with our constituents,” said Victoria Lee, co-founder of Welcome to Chinatown.
The local adoption contrasts sharply with recent corporate downsizing. Amazon announced 16,000 job cuts last month, including several hundred in New York City, as its CEO embraces extensive AI use. The payments company Block eliminated 40% of its workforce last week due to AI efficiencies, according to the source material.
New York organizations are adopting AI more enthusiastically than most of the country, according to a survey by Anthropic released earlier this year, with only Washington, D.C., showing more aggressive adoption rates.
“Early data shows that New Yorkers are adopting AI more quickly than people in other cities, and I’m not surprised because New York is filled with ambitious, hard working people that are always trying to do more than less,” said Julie Samuels, executive director of the trade group Tech:NYC.
Training programs organized by business and trade groups are driving the trend. Diamond received six weeks of training through the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce’s Tech to Table program, which teaches restaurant owners to use AI for inventory management, sales and cost tracking, staffing and marketing strategies. The program, supported by Google, provides participants with a $5,000 grant upon completion.
The Tech:NYC Foundation operates the more ambitious Decoded Futures program, which has trained three cohorts of 25 nonprofits each through eight-week sessions where members work on projects with tech mentors. A fourth group began meeting last month. The Robinhood Foundation, Google and other tech companies heavily support the program.
“A big driver for getting into the program was that I was using AI, but my chief operating officer was not,” Lee recalled. “I could bring her and start to teach her how to use AI.”
Lee, who considers herself technologically adept, initially used ChatGPT to help manage her ADHD, which she says paralyzes her when confronted with tasks and blank documents. By discussing projects with the AI tool, she can push ahead with her work. She has since moved on to using Anthropic’s Claude.
Before implementing AI, Welcome to Chinatown relied on volunteers to conduct neighborhood interviews with paper and pen, tracking business openings and closures, vacant spaces, and community needs. However, the organization’s six full-time staff members and three part-timers lacked resources to effectively analyze the collected data.
Using Claude at a monthly cost of $322, Welcome to Chinatown now analyzes city data to create neighborhood zone datasets. Volunteers walk designated areas and use their phones to input key information about changes.
“We can approach a new business and say ‘Hey, welcome to Chinatown.’ Or if there is a vacancy we can alert entrepreneurs who we know are looking for spaces,” Lee explained.
The shift demonstrates how smaller organizations are finding practical applications for AI technology that enhance rather than replace human workers, offering a counternarrative to widespread concerns about job displacement in the rapidly evolving technological landscape.
