Jacksonville is an up-and-coming city for innovative companies and back-office fintech firms, but due to a myriad of reasons, such as expertise and connections, information might not be shared equitably throughout the community.
To solve that problem, JaxBridges was created many years ago. Now on it's 20th cohort of business leaders going through the 12-week course, it too is updating with the times and embracing the ever evolving face of technology.
As a part of JaxBridges, the upcoming cohort will participate at the Open Innovation Center, supported by the JTA and JaxChamber, with a new generative artificial intelligence program that is pre-trained for entrepreneur support.
The project is a product of many years of Carlton Robinson's work. The chief innovation officer for the JaxChamber said he was able to feed the generative AI model between 10 and 12 years' worth of his research on businesses and finance and program commands to conduct a variety of functions like improve a pitch or perform a SWOT analysis, among other functions.
He said the autonomous nature will still need the helping hand of someone trained on the system, but the innovation is simultaneously being driven by a human mentor's potential variability.
Carlton suggested a scenario: Someone seeking advice on a day when he is in a good mood and with time to help is in a much better position for meaningful advice than someone else seeking assistance on a day where he is in a rush.
"That part of humanity is inevitable," Carlton told the Business Journal earlier this week while demonstrating the program. "But with our pre-trained entrepreneur support model, we will be able to give consistently good advice to everyone."
He said this model also helps negate the problem of trying to help an entrepreneur who is seeking niche or specialty advice. By the nature of what generative AI is capable of, it will aways be a reasonable source of highly technical information, Carlton said.
After inputting highly technical information on a fictitious business he planned to create and a problem he intended to solve, the AI was able to outline a pitch and an action item list for the potential business owner within minutes. He was then able to enter a myriad of commands to parse the information further and to create highly detailed, specific plans of action for the user.
"I believe that this is the first, if not, one of the first pre-trained entrepreneur support models in the country," he said.
Although the waitlist for JaxBridges is high, the first group of 120 entrepreneurs will begin using this tool next week.
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