How Businesses Are Using AI: Takeaways from EFBC’s Marketing Roundtable
The September 23 Marketing Roundtable was led and facilitated by EFBC Strategic Partner ODEA, featuring Patty Rioux, President of ODEA, and JJ Lattea, Technical Marketing Manager / Content Producer. Together, they guided a practical conversation around how businesses are using AI today and invited EFBC members to share the tools, workflows and experiments they’re putting into practice.
One of our members recently got a quote to have custom operations software built. The price was more than they wanted to spend, so they built the system themselves using Claude Code.
That was just one of the examples shared at our Marketing Roundtable on September 23, where members and Strategic Partners talked about what they’re actually doing with AI right now.
And they’re not the only ones. 58% of small businesses used generative AI in 2025, up from 40% in 2024 and 23% in 2023, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. At this point, the question for most businesses isn’t whether to use AI. It’s where to start.
Here are some of the ideas that stood out.
Start with an AI Policy
One of the first topics that came up was AI policy. The consensus was simple: every company should have one.
Employees are already using AI, whether or not there’s a policy in place. In ISACA’s 2026 AI Pulse Poll, 90 percent of respondents believe employees are using AI in their organization, but only 38 percent of organizations have a formal, comprehensive AI policy, and a quarter have no active policy at all.
Most employees want to use AI responsibly. A clear policy gives them guidance around which tools they can use, what company or customer information can be shared with those tools, and where human review is still needed.
Patty Rioux of ODEA also brought up AI disclosure. She recommended beginning to label and keep track of AI images now, even if you aren’t required to disclose them today. Standards are already starting to move in that direction. California’s AI Transparency Act became operative on August 2, 2026, requiring providers of widely used generative AI systems to embed provenance disclosures in AI images, video and audio. That law applies to the AI companies, not the businesses using their tools, but it’s a good sign of where things are heading. If disclosure standards change, you won’t have to go back and figure out which assets were created with AI.
You Can Build More Than You Might Think
Some of the most interesting examples of the morning had very little to do with marketing.
Members showed internal systems they had built using Claude Code to manage things like work orders, production, orders and shipping. Along with the member who decided to build instead of outsource, another member shared a similar operational platform that an intern had built.
That led to a conversation about how much trust to put in something built with AI. One member’s rule was that they wouldn’t have an AI system do something they didn’t understand themselves.
These tools make building custom software much more accessible, but someone still needs to understand what’s happening behind the scenes.
AI Can Prep You for a Meeting
Another member shared a workflow they use to prepare their team for meetings.
Using Claude and information from a prospective company’s website, the system pulls together company research, key people, competitors, suggested questions, icebreakers and potential talking points. Everything is organized into a meeting prep document and pushed into HubSpot for the representative to use.
Researching before a meeting isn’t new. AI just takes most of the manual work out of it.
AI Is Making Creative Work Faster
JJ Lattea of ODEA gave the group a look at Adobe Firefly and some of the ways ODEA is using Adobe’s AI features. He walked through an example of prompting Firefly to create an ad for LinkedIn, showing how specific you can get with the subject, setting, format, lighting and other details.
Members also talked about using AI for product photography, like taking an existing product image and putting that product into different settings. For companies that regularly need new product or lifestyle imagery, this can save a lot of production time.
Patty made an interesting point about what this means for creative skills. Something as simple as manually removing the background from a headshot used to be a normal part of the job. As AI handles more of those tasks almost instantly, some of those skills may eventually become a lost art.
Search Is Changing Too
We also talked about what AI means for SEO.
One member shared a dashboard their company uses to see where it shows up in AI search results. That’s becoming more important as people use tools like ChatGPT alongside traditional search engines. In G2’s 2026 research, 51% of B2B software buyers now start their research with AI over Google, and 69% ended up choosing a different vendor than they originally planned based on AI chatbot guidance.
Businesses have spent years asking, “Where do we rank on Google?” It may be time to start asking, “Do we show up when someone asks AI about our industry?” An easy way to find out is to ask ChatGPT or Claude yourself.
One Thing to Take Back to Your Business
The examples shared during the roundtable were very different, but most started in the same place: a real task or problem that was taking too much time.
Creating another product image. Researching a company before a meeting. Tracking production. Building software that would otherwise be expensive to outsource.
You don’t necessarily need to start by asking, “What should our company be doing with AI?”
A more useful question might be: “What are we spending too much time doing today?”
That may be the easiest place to find an AI use case worth trying.
Thank you to Patty Rioux and JJ Lattea of ODEA for facilitating the conversation, and to the EFBC members who came ready to share what they’re testing, building and learning.
Sources
U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Empowering Small Business report (via Capsule CRM summary)
California AI Transparency Act overview