Harvard just put AI coaches inside a $699 bootcamp, and the implications for small business owners are bigger than they look.

A Harvard-grade pitch coach for less than a flight to Boston. Harvard Business School's Foundry program now includes AI avatars of its actual instructors. Not chatbots with canned feedback. Simulated versions of real HBS faculty that watch you pitch and respond in real time, the way a demanding investor or board member would. You can practice your funding pitch, your board update, your big client presentation, over and over, at 11pm if you want, without anyone judging you for stumbling through slide three four times in a row. The whole program runs $699. A single hour with a decent executive coach runs more than that in most cities. If you've ever wished you had someone sharp to pressure-test your story before a high-stakes meeting, this is worth a hard look. Full story here.

Scaling smarter is not the same as scaling faster, and founders are starting to figure that out. Forbes talked to entrepreneurs who are using AI in a way that's more interesting than "we automated our emails." The pattern: hand off production work to AI (writing drafts, summarizing reports, building first-pass analyses), keep the relationship and strategy work human, and use AI to flag operational problems before they compound. One way to think about it is a kitchen analogy. The chef still decides what's on the menu and talks to the regulars. The AI is doing the prep work in the back. The founders profiled here are protective of what makes their businesses worth running, not just cheaper to operate. That framing matters. If your current AI use is purely about cutting costs, you may be solving the wrong problem. Full story here.

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Apollo is running a free live webinar on August 27 (1pm ET) that puts Claude and ChatGPT head-to-head on real sales tasks like prospect research and list building. If you use Apollo or are weighing which AI fits your outbound workflow, this is a practical hour. Register here.

GoEnhance AI added tools that let you restyle existing video footage into animated, cinematic, or illustrated versions, which is useful if you're repurposing content without a production budget. More here.

MarketBlazer.ai launched what it's calling an all-in-one AI marketing platform aimed at small businesses. Details here.

a16z argues that foreign and immigrant founders get a structural edge from AI because the technology erases some of the communication and network gaps that traditionally slowed them down. Read the argument here.

Matter relaunched its local marketing services with a pitch specifically aimed at Main Street businesses trying to stay visible as AI reshapes search and discovery. More here.

-Scott

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