Supporting cspan as a Public Service along with these other providers. Giving you a front row see to democracy. A discussion about the challenges and opportunities of Artificial Intelligence for Small Businesses hosted by the bipartisan center. Can you hear me now . Sorry about that. Technology jumped in and took away. Im not sure how much you heard. I am a board member at a Venture Capitalist here in washington, d. C. Running the office of investment and innovation. That is the oai as they call ita as you know, you have to have three letter acronyms wherever possible. You just saw some clips from the sba, i should say it is observation gathering on the economics of our nation. Seeming to get more press than anybody i know. Talking about not only the sba interspecific team and teammates , but also how technology and specifically ai and Machine Learning are affecting Small Business learning. Thank you for joining us today. It is a pleasure to be with you, mark. Lets get started with somehow speaking, so to speak. Tell ourve viewers what the offe of investment and innovation does. It is an incredible office. It is an honor and privilege to be a temporary steward of this office. Our mission, humbly, is to support ensuring that u. S. Entrepreneurs and Small Business owners founded the startup can get access to longterm equity to help them start, scale, grow and sustain incredible businesses that create jobs and improve the u. S. Economy more broadly. What is incredibly exciting about all of this, it is so much more than just capital. The capital is incredibly important. If you dont have capital, it is hard to do much else. But our office is also responsible for managing and administering the Small BusinessInnovation Research and Technology Transfer program. Those not familiar, they are programmed. We administer and support them among agencies. We work with those agencies to be supportive of providing contracts and grants to support prototyping, research, commercialization of cuttingedge technology. Incredible program that has been in existence for over 40 years and provides 4 billion of non diluted funding every single year to support innovation. Last and certainly not least, we run a portfolio Innovation Ecosystem support program. There are incredible organizations that cross public and private sector philanthropy andd Corporate Network to provie expertise and support to entrepreneurs that are building innovated companies. Incubators and accelerators. We work with networks to provide them with grants and prizes to fund their operation. We do that through something called the gross Accelerator Fund competition to our federal and state Technology Partnership programs. Also, we recently assumed responsibility for an exciting portfolio called the regional information cluster which will focus on an industry vertical or Technology Expertise in a particular area to support Small Businesses. So, like i said, it is a privilege to get to work on so many expanding missions and be able to have an impact for so many entrepreneurs and also to support them in building and create so many Job Opportunities well, i am obviously biased since i proceeded you by at least one administration, as they usedk to say. I think the program are bluntly not marketed well enough. If the common citizen knew the impact of where those funds that teare allocated each year throuh you and your teammates go and the impact it had on not just uttechnology or startups, businesses that we use every single day, i think they would all be amazed and super thankful for the publicprivate ownership value and energy that oai brings from a larger perspective, the sba has been the center of an unbelievable out pouring of capitalta during covid in the various programs. Has it combed down over at hq since all of the outflow of capital to help Small Businesses across the u. S. . You and i have not caught up about this. I am actually wearing a dual hat right now. I am serving. Very excited to act as the acting administrator for the office of capital access. In addition with the office of investment and innovation, i am also leaving our capital office. Working Capital Loans and Asset Based Lending but also all of our disaster lending programs including ppp and the idle programs. We are certainly at a different point in that journey and the incredible thing, i think that this is a great opportunity, the Brand Awareness off the sba has never been greater across america. With that, it prevents dash present manyen opportunities for us to extend our support, across our broader portfolio to be there to meet the needs of Small Business owners and entrepreneurs that are launching innovative startups across the country. You do have many had spirit that keeps you awesomely busy. I did not know, but congratulations, or maybe my condolences on adding all of that responsibility. I know that emergency and disaster funds have been particularly top of the news with allie and other arenas. I am sure our listeners do not realize how it is so important in these Disaster Recovery efforts. Give us an example of how they have been a real player and folks recovering from disastrous situations like the recent fire in maui. Yeah, so, it is interesting. I wasas naive with this before transitioning from the credit sector. We often think of fema immediately when there is a national disaster. Te but, the reality is, a large percentage and a greater percentage of Financial Support actually comes from the sba. They provide low cost loans to homeowners, Business Owners to be there to support them and to recover from national disasters. In addition to supporting them by getting access to capital that they need quickly and many otimes to recover from these situations, there are teams of boots on the ground to provide technical and support for local roprograms and philanthropy. I think it is something that everybody was worked there can be incredibly proud of. We take a whole agency approach and supporting recovery and we should just knowledge this is a really challenging and trying time for Small Business owners. Americans in their lives also affected by this. Just to remind our viewers of thwhich there is apparently a wonderful number, we will have q a. If you have a question, be sure to type it in chat. We will have a curated recitation of questions that i will present a little bit later in our conversation. Another 10 or 15 minutes or so. The idea, sadly in my opinion, a hidden partner in so many s important things that happened in Business Development and Disaster Relief that we just discussed. One of the things, i hope i phrase this delicately or in a way that does not sound confrontational. Not to you, but n to the government in general. Sometimes in governmentme agencs , not so much the department off defense which often gets the best technology, but the platform for best technology and handling data and et cetera can sometimes be a little bit behind the curve and other government agencies. Your interaction with Small Businesses, you would need to be , i would argue, you and your teammates need to be closer to the tip of the spear of where technology is taking Small Businesses and how they interact with their marketplaces. Artificial intelligence and Machine Learning are the n newet zone here. In the view of many it is either satan that will destroy e everything or the visitation f the great savior who will make our lives less drudgery filled, et cetera. What are some ways that you and your teammates are deploying ai or you are seeing Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning affecting the Small Business arena. So, first, i certainly would not take your comments to be a criticism, butkn an acknowledgmt of what exists in appropriations between our different federal agencies. I think that we should all be so grateful that our Defense Department is so wellfunded and our National Security is paramount to everything else. Working properly in this country i will say that i think that we are all grateful that congress moved with speed and with the pandemic and providing funding to support the ppp program. With that also administrative funds to support the operations of the agency. I wouldld applaud, i think we would all applaud. For those that dont know, she also has previously served as chief of staff. She knew the inner workings of the agency quite well. She was able to move swiftly and understood the need for technology and modernization and improved nests to ensure that we could effectively get funding out the door rapidly to make sure that Small Businesses did not go under and we were able to save american jobs. That was in the massive investment in technology. She had invested heavily in modernizing on the technology front. I think we can also all admit that we are the least funded agency with cabinet level reference communications yet the sba has to meet the call and we are privileged to meet the call of supportingg over 33 million Small Businesses in the u. S. Businesses that create over 99 of newon jobs every single yearn this country. So, i could not think of an agency that needs more funding to ensure that we are able to meet those needs. One thing is inevitable. We know that that is changed. We know that that is changing technology. We go through periods where change happens very rapidly. The Technology Innovation cycle only seems to speed up which is exciting, but, it also present risks and considerations. With that, it requires support, technology and to be able to secure technology that we need to effectively meet the needs of Small Businesses. Also to not introduce security risks. Also taking many steps to improve cybersecurity at the agency by leveling up the role of our Cyber Security officer within the agency. Additionally, though, incredibly customer centric and technology forwardte. She actually launched an incredible pilot program. Awarding partners and the region just announcedtn more funding ad more partners. That way we can be there to meet their needs. The complexity continues to grow meet them where they are. Understand their needs and help them gain access to tools. I would say one of the things that is incredibly exciting is the launch of a Publicprivate Partnership that we have for the ceSmall Business digital alliane where several large corporations microsoft and others to provide a Small Business and entrepreneur with the tools that they may need to be able to start adapting to years of Artificial Intelligence tools and technology more broadly. Safely and securely. You mentioned, i am just the reasonable president of the fan clubar. Execution has been my perspective has been valuable and just knowing how to operate but also to describe the needs of the machine and other funding arenas and implement those conversations into improvements. So, congratulations to all involved in particularly, the administrator. This idea of engaging Large Technology companies, you named a few of them there and they are the big ones. Helping provide toolsets and feedback and productive uses of ai and ml, this seems to be the way that the sba has always led, i think in Public Private partnerships. I guess the first challenges i would argue you are facing is just a database challenge alone. You interact with so many customers, so many businesses, so many grant recipients, et cetera, just generating the database who did what and who receive what appeared many Different Things in the wedifferent programs. The federal government we collected a lot of collective. With that we have the information. But it also begs the question about how can you use that information it howse can you use it for the right purposes to the benefit of Small Businesses. The benefit of policymaking to have better programs and better solutions. That is a big challenge. How do you structure the data. How do you use more advanced systems and technology. How do you think about the use of, you know, Large Language Models to support adaptive learning and training on the data so that way we can have better insights. Moving with this technology in the right way. We hear people will talk a lot about fear and we do need to think about security. At the same time, technology will always be changing. You are either leading change or you are responding to it. So, we have to think about how do we lead responsibly. But that we are thinking broadly about the needs of the different stakeholders. How do we remove and ensure that we are collecting truth and facts and using that to make informed decisions. Using that information to make informed decisions of all of our programs. There is a big build up in theen agency to have a more customer centric view and more customer centric support. So, that means connect the dots broadly across programs. I think that it is very exciting the potential that that presents for us to be more customer centric in terms of our delivery it is a different world than we have operated in the past. And it is one that will create many efficiencies that we are able to invest in those improvements and enhancements for thehe agency. Also going back to the earlier point of how the agency has traditionally embarked on Public Private partnerships, i think that we do that really well. What i would also say is this great enthusiasm is the support that we had broadly from the white house and also from leadership at the agency and other agencies as well is support for the broader ecosystem stakeholders beyond this large corporation. A network of over 1700 financial to provide loans to Small Businesses. On the investment side, we partner with over 300 private funds. That is a lot of large and small Asset Management firms. They have investors that are there working with entrepreneurs helping them get access to funding and access to networks. All sorts of relationships and also throw a sense of our partnership with agencies that we work within our innovation programs. I am really delighted and looking forward to the opportunities and incredible storiesnd. I anticipate we will see these coming out of our recently formed a partnership. Or i should say growing our partnership with the Defense Department. So our relationship with the office of Strategic Capital, not only will we be be working on these opportunities, but, now, we will be aligning our Investment Program to create opportunities for private funds to work with s va to get capital from sba, but also to get value add support to the department in the office of Strategic Capital to help them get access to phds and subject Matter Experts on technology that is critical to our National Security to support the American Investment in tech elegy such as trusted ai is one example. But also quantum computing. Hypersonic viewed renewable energy. Not these things that the department of defense is seeking to secure, it is the technology that we want to build here in the u. S. Have jobs created in the u. S. Support the innovation here in the u. S. So, again, we are leading change and not responding to change. We have leaders across our country both public and debit sectors that are informing how we use technology. So they are improving. Just a reminder. We will have some q and a. I will be reflecting some of the question somere of the folks putting the child in just a minute. We have a couple already teed up the before we get to those, they are prettyy predictable, as you may suspect. I am interested in one of the, sort of the biggest worries that you keep hearing around Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. It will eradicate a whole chunk of jobs. I note that jobs and job growth, sba has always proudly carried the bond in the banner that Small Businesses are in fact job creation the job maintenance at the United States far beyond the megacorporations. This idea of ai, this carnivorous ones and zeros engine that will take away all of these jobs that people currently employ, are there ways that you and your colleagues at the department ofos labor or otr agencie