Trust but Verify: Using AI for Small-Business Research

Entrepreneurship requires constant learning. Whether you are researching a new market, evaluating regulations, understanding a customer trend, learning new technology, or making strategic decisions, business owners are expected to absorb and interpret information quickly. AI tools are increasingly being promoted as a solution for faster research, learning, and decision-making — but how do you know when to trust the output, when to verify it, and when to avoid using AI altogether? This session is designed to help entrepreneurs navigate that challenge with confidence.

In this interactive workshop, we’ll explore how AI can support business research, learning, and problem-solving while also examining the limitations, assumptions, and risks that come with AI-generated information. Participants will practice evaluating outputs, identifying red flags, validating claims, and determining what makes AI-generated research genuinely useful in a real-world business context.

Throughout the session, we will:

• Explore a practical framework for assessing whether an AI-generated output is credible, useful, and appropriate for business decision-making.
• Compare traditional business research methods with AI-assisted research to better understand the strengths, gaps, assumptions, and tradeoffs of each approach.
• Learn how AI can help entrepreneurs quickly understand unfamiliar concepts, current events, technical topics, regulations, and business terminology — especially when they need a fast starting point for learning.
• Examine high-profile AI failures and breakdowns to better understand how hallucinations, weak sourcing, bias, flawed assumptions, and automation errors occur.
• Practice reviewing sample AI outputs to identify unsupported claims, vague sourcing, misleading statistics, overgeneralizations, and hidden assumptions.
• Learn lateral reading and research validation techniques to fact-check AI-generated information and trace claims back to credible sources.
• Discuss when AI is an appropriate tool for a business problem — and when another approach may be more effective.
• Apply these concepts to realistic business examples and a possible photography-industry case study focused on market research and decision-making.

Rather than treating AI as a replacement for expertise, this session focuses on how entrepreneurs can use AI thoughtfully as a research assistant, brainstorming partner, and learning tool while remaining the decision-maker and “human in the loop.” Participants will leave with practical strategies for combining AI speed with human judgment, helping them make more informed and responsible business decisions.

By the end of this session, you will:

• Understand a framework for evaluating whether AI-generated research and outputs are trustworthy, relevant, and actionable.
• Learn how to use AI tools for quick foundational research and learning while recognizing the limitations of AI-generated summaries.
• Identify common signs of hallucinations, weak sourcing, misleading statistics, overconfidence, and unsupported assumptions in AI outputs.
• Practice reviewing AI-generated business research and assessing the credibility of claims, sources, and recommendations.
• Understand how lateral reading and source validation techniques can help verify AI-supported research.
• Compare traditional business research approaches with AI-assisted workflows and recognize common gaps that may still require human expertise or additional validation.
• Explore practical small business use cases where AI can accelerate learning, brainstorming, and research tasks.
• Better understand how AI systems work, why errors occur, and how entrepreneurs can reduce risk when using these tools in their business.

NOTE: This session is designed for entrepreneurs, small business owners, and professionals who:

• Have experimented with at least one AI tool such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Copilot, or NotebookLM.
• Want to improve how they evaluate and use AI-generated information in business settings.
• Are interested in using AI to support learning, research, planning, marketing, or decision-making.