Conversation with my good colleague Gene Marks, the Small Business Columnist at the Guardian newspaper and the Philadelphia Inquire and other distinguished publications,

about his recent trip to Nashville, Tennessee to speak to the Alabama Bankers Association. I asked about AI. What are their

concerns? What are their interests? What is their involvement? And Jean has a very careful answer about how small and community banks,

this is representative of the Alabama Bankers Association,

are waiting for the large banks to large companies to develop

software that is useful. They are not investing in software AI software yet because

they do not see the path forward. They don't have the

cash to do R&D. So what's coming is the startups yes but also the large banks developing mechanisms that everyone can use.

This is Gene Marks, small business in America, waiting for AI, especially small business

bankers.

More of this later.

So the bankers themselves are interested in artificial intelligence, but here's what I'm saying.

It's a very good question because they are very reflective of businesses across

the country when it comes to artificial intelligence and let me explain why the people

in this room were not from Wells Fargo or Citibank or any of the giant giant banks.

This is the Alabama Bankers Association, so their representation, John, were mostly community

and independent banks, you know, smaller banks, you know, like most

small and mid-sized businesses, they don't have the money to spend on, on, you know, AI applications and that's why you know there was a big report in the

Wall Street Journal just this past week and I've been writing about this in

Forbes how you know the money that's being spent on AI is being spent by very large

companies that's where the AI action is at right now they are developing large

language models for customer service, chat pots, those types of generative AI knowledge

...