AI on Main Street: What We Learned Hosting NY Tech Week 2026
Written by Bryan Lozano, Chief Strategy Officer at Welcome to Chinatown
NY Tech Week attendees at The Hub with Jason Liu and me, Bryan Lozano!
Last week, about 50 people packed into the Welcome to Chinatown Innovation Hub at 115 Bowery for our first-ever NYC Tech Week event. We had bites from Yaya Tea, ice cream from Soft Swerve, and a room full of people who came curious about what AI actually looks like for small businesses on the ground.
The night's clearest lesson came from the business owners themselves, and it was exactly what we've been seeing all year.
Jason Liu runs Soft Swerve, a six-location ice cream shop in New York City. Henry Ng runs Ideas of Order, an architecture and interior design firm. Earlier this year, Bboth came to our training at different points, for different reasons, with different problems to solve. When we asked them to walk through how they built their tools, they said almost the exact same thing.
It starts with the problem, not the technology.
Before Jason built Swerve Intelligence, a custom sales dashboard that tracks flavor performance, modifier data, and revenue patterns across all six of his locations in real time, he mapped his workflow. He knew exactly what he needed to see and why. He brought his own expertise to the table. The technology was just the thing that helped him get there.
Henry did the same. He didn't start by asking what AI could do. He started by asking what was broken in his procurement process. Nine days later, working evenings, he had a custom tool built from scratch that replaced a mess of spreadsheets and saved him from a $150-200 monthly software subscription that was never quite right anyway.
Neither of them is a developer. Neither of them came in thinking this was for them.
That's the point.
We are proud to be selected as the designated AI training hub for small businesses across New York State.
The gap in AI adoption for small businesses isn't access to tools. It's the absence of guidance on how to think about the problem before you open the laptop. That's what Welcome to Chinatown has been focused on this year as New York State's designated AI training hub for small businesses. The fact that our businesses are actively building, solving real problems, and sharing what they've learned with a room full of people is what shows this approach is working.
We also heard from Robby Abaya and Saloni Sharma, two technologists who volunteered with our first small business AI hackathon. What struck us about their reflections was the intentionality they brought. They talked about meeting business owners where they are, not where you want them to be. About listening before building. About the responsibility that comes with showing up in a community that hasn't always been well served by the tech industry.
They also made a direct ask to the room: get involved. Our small businesses need engineers, designers, and strategists who are willing to show up and do the work alongside them.
The demand is there. The room was full. The waitlist was longer. The conversation kept going well past 7pm.
We're just getting started.
