After talking to several small business owners, we feel there is an impression among this community that AI is too expensive for their business. However, there are several AI tools that are free to use. There are even solutions that you can run locally if you’re worried about sharing information to the large corporations managing the public AI solutions such as CoPilot.

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Our Experience with AI

Over the last three decades, AI has gone in and out of vogue and you can see that in our experiences with it.

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In 1996, we worked on neural networks to predict breast cancer rates, gathering family histories, genetic data, and digital X‑rays. It was difficult work since hard drive space was expensive ($2000 for a 2 gig drive)  and my work computer only  had only 32 MB of RAM.

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By 2017, we  were consulting for a medical company, using TensorFlow to identify high‑risk patients and notify doctors through a mobile app.

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In 2024, we built a wastewater treatment simulator that predicted plant behavior under different conditions—our first project using AI chatbots to assist with coding.

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In 2025, we applied AI to social media development and insurance claims scoring, where the higher the score the higher the priority for the claims agent. In addition we used a neural network implementation to identify photographs that were similar.

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More on the History of AI

We provide these examples to show that AI has been around for a while. In fact, there were chatbots and other AI tools starting back in the late 1950’s just when the first computer prototypes were being built.

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AI as a field formally began in the 1950s. John McCarthy coined the term Artificial Intelligence in 1956 and created Lisp, the language that shaped early AI research. Marvin Minsky co‑founded the MIT AI Lab and helped define the philosophical and mathematical foundations of the field.

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Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon contributed the Logic Theorist—often considered the first AI program—and the General Problem Solver, which attempted to model human reasoning through symbolic manipulation.

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These early efforts laid the groundwork for decades of research, even if the technology of the time limited what AI could achieve especially since consumers didn’t have any home computing available because computers were the size of a large refrigerator like you would find at a restaurant. AI is catching on now since almost all of us have a phone that would have been a super computer in the 1980s in our pockets.

 

Let Us Help

Do you think AI can help your company?  Let’s collaborate and see what’s possible and affordable!  Reach out today!