Collaborating with Students to Create an AI Tool for Small Businesses 

The UW-Madison SBDC and students from UW’s Tech Exploration Lab build AI tool 

In 2020, the UW-Madison Small Business Development Center at the Wisconsin School of Business (SBDC) created a guide called “Navigating the New Normal,” to help small businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Over 500 companies downloaded the resource. SBDC Erica Kauten Director Michelle Somes-Booher and program manager Heather Ferguson knew businesses could continue to benefit from the information in the guide and decided to give it a refresh.  

“We knew it still had a lot of good strategic planning information in it, but it was not being used because it referenced COVID and therefore seemed outdated,” Ferguson says. “Yet most of the concepts were still valid–the guide is a combination of business best practices and goal setting.”  

Ferguson and SBDC business consultant Amy Bruner Zimmerman began teaching AI workshops in 2023, and one day it clicked– a revised version of Navigating the New Normal could become an AI tool.   

Ferguson began by scoping what the tool would and would not do and considered how to reconfigure the guide’s content in a new format.  

“I wanted to create a quiz that gave users actionable suggestions, so I started by turning relevant topics from the guide into questions. As I thought about meaning and scoring, it became pretty complex,” Ferguson says. “If there are four possible answers to a survey question, what are the choices, how does each answer get rated, and what does the final rating mean?”  

Collaborating with the UW Tech Exploration Lab 

To refine the tool, Somes-Booher suggested connecting with the UW Tech Exploration Lab, which launched in 2025. Director Sandra Bradley pulled together a team of students to work with Ferguson on the project and develop real-world skills through experiential learning. An AI U grant from Google.org to the American Small Business Development Centers (ASBDC) funded the project. The student team collaborated with Ferguson to create an online questionnaire that could assess the type of assistance business owners need.  

The AI bot, now named SBDC StrategyAssist, is a generative AI adviser that provides recommendations based on over 100 scenarios. Under the hood, the tool considers quiz questions and scoring; includes explanations about the meaning of the quiz results; and incorporates a layer that defines tone, so the responses are appropriate for long-term business planning or crisis management. The students added formatting, business term definitions, and parameters to control response length. 

“We translated all the logic of the COVID-era guide into the tool,” says Devanshi Jain, a rising junior computer science and math major who has worked as the technical and backend lead on the project for its entirety. 

Small business owners can use the tool at their convenience to respond to 50 questions. Results include three high-level recommendations, plus additional recommendations and advisor-approved suggestions. Business owners can choose to download the results and bring them to their next SBDC consulting meeting, request a free SBDC business consultation, or view more results.  

Ferguson expects that small business owners who use StrategyAssist for self-exploration before coming to the SBDC for a no-cost business consultation will arrive further along in their thought process than they might have without the tool, which will lead to more substantive conversations right off the bat. SBDC business consultations involve gathering background info to fully understand the client’s business. Because SBDC business consultants helped formulate the questions that now appear in StrategyAssist, a client could easily download their responses to those questions prior to their first meeting with a business consultant, making that first meeting even more productive. 

“The vision for StrategyAssist has always been that it should help both sides of the advising process–both business owners and advisors,” Jain says. “It can serve as an educational resource and also be a self-assessment platform.”  

The questions allow users to think about the aspects of running a business–financials; leadership; products and services; operations; and customers. As they answer the questions, they gain clarity about their strengths, weaknesses, and next steps. 

“The tool identifies which area the client should pay the most attention to, and if the steps are simple, the client could implement them first and request a consultation in a month,” Jain says. “The results help them realize whether they can continue moving on independently, or if they need to reach out for guidance.” 

[photo from student showcase; photos of students who worked on project] 

Experiential learning for students in AI 

Jain, who also has a role with TEL as an AI and technical engineer, has worked with five other students on the StrategyAssist project. Most recently, Kenzie Kujava designed and built the UI, and Tim Kane is serving as project manager. 

“Devanshi asked great questions at the outset about audience and parameters,” says Ferguson. “She’s really thoughtful and offers great suggestions.”  

Jain has honed her understanding of stakeholder requirements, built the backend, built the scoring engine, learned cloud infrastructure, learned security measures, and learned about UX.  

“The biggest thing I learned is that building a successful application that will be used by real clients and advisors is about writing the code and understanding the people who are going to use it–and continuously changing it to adapt to their needs,” Jain says. “I’ve worked closely with Heather and the SBDC to gather multiple rounds of feedback, and I’ve learned to balance technical decisions and user needs.” 

Jain says this is one of her first experiences being part of an entire project lifecycle, from the initial idea through developing the prototype, and says the StrategyAssist project has allowed her to connect classroom concepts with a project that helps real users.  

“Working on the SBDC tool has been one of the most valuable experiences of my academic career,” says Jain. “I learned about applied AI and machine learning concepts, learned how to use AI systems to make decisions and improve the user experience, learned about cloud infrastructure and prompt engineering methods, and how software architecture makes a system solid and functional.” 

Jain says the experience gave her a sense of what software engineers do in industry, and she learned to collaborate with a team, communicate technical ideas to non-technical users, manage a project, and address new priorities.  

“It gave me confidence in my ability to take ownership of future such projects, work across domains, and create solutions,” Jain says.  

Jain’s role at TEL has evolved with this project–she began as a student innovator at the lab, which currently has 200 student projects in progress, and is now an AI and technical engineer.  

“I’m building a resource tracker to track the lab’s huge number of projects,” Jain says. “After this SBDC project, I will join new TEL projects, helping other students bridge the gap between ideas and deployment.”  

Innovative Use of AI 

StrategyAssist represents an innovative use of AI that will give clients access to a strategy-planning tool any time, even when the SBDC office is not open. The Wisconsin SBDC at UW-Madison is known as a leader in innovation across the SBDC network for creating tools that support clients’ entrepreneurial education and recently won the inaugural statewide Innovation in Action Award. Centers across the U.S. already use the team’s Beginner’s Guide to Financial Projections and First Steps to Starting a Business course, and StrategyAssist will also be accessible to clients across the country, enhancing the customer experience for SBDC clients nationwide. Plus, students like Jain and SBDC staff like Ferguson have developed new technical skills. 

“I hope small businesses can use this tool to transform their businesses and make better decisions,” Jain says. “It’s been a great experience.” 

“Our student team has been amazing,” says Ferguson. “I love that students had the opportunity to learn real-world project development as the tool evolved and that I could learn from their technical expertise, as well. We’re excited that we were able to use the AI U grant from Google.org to both build a tool that could be used nationwide and to build skills for our future workforce.”