Small Business
# healthcare
# Small Business
Designing the emotional map of recovery
After breast cancer, Allison Leeds found that medicine could explain a surgical plan but offered little guidance on what recovery would feel like day to day, emotionally. She began using ChatGPT in early 2025 to synthesize more than 11,000 patient experiences drawn from public forums, then paired those insights with research in color science and neuroaesthetics to explore how visual environments can shape stress and pain. The result became a new tool for recovery: weekly art cards that combine color palettes with mantras, designed to arrive in cadence with the hardest parts of healing. Shared with support groups, the cards quickly resonated with patients and caregivers and grew into Leeds’s business, built between surgeries with AI acting as a research partner and product scaffold. Her broader body of work, The Healing Spectrum, is now exhibited at SFMOMA, extending the same idea: recovery needs information for the heart, not only the body.
Diagon, founded by longtime manufacturing procurement leader Will Drewery, applies GPT-5 to one of the most consequential bottlenecks in industrial growth: finding and buying highly specialized machines. Drewery’s experience sourcing equipment across global factories, including managing roughly $3.5 billion in capital spending at Tesla during a period of explosive workforce growth, shaped a clear insight. Plants create jobs and revenue only after the right machines are installed, yet procurement remains slow, opaque, and reliant on fragmented information and expert memory.
# workforce
Kaija Pack turned grief after her husband’s sudden death into Break Life Houston, a 10,000-square-foot “rage room” where people safely vent stress by smashing objects in themed spaces, including a dedicated scream room. After attending OpenAI’s Small Business Jam, she began using ChatGPT to research competitors, refine pricing conversations, and boost weekday traffic, helping a small family-run team operate more efficiently. The tool also helped her craft clearer messaging about why Break Life costs more than smaller rivals by emphasizing the bigger, better-equipped experience. For Pack, AI became a practical force multiplier that supports growth while staying rooted in the business’s core purpose: making it acceptable to feel anger and express it safely.
# workforce
When Jasmine Hudson and her team at Black Paper Party wanted to reimagine “The 12 Days of Christmas” through a Black cultural lens, they used ChatGPT to brainstorm lyrics that became the creative anchor for a new holiday product line. The resulting remix, full of vivid references from Tuskegee Airmen to gold grills, helped the team expand a spark into a cohesive collection that refreshes familiar seasonal imagery with authentic representation, now carried by Walmart. Beyond that signature collaboration, Jasmine uses ChatGPT to accelerate product ideation, refine brand voice in the company’s “rich auntie” tone, build seasonal plans, and support operational work like inventory forecasting, partner discovery for pop-ups, and nonprofit outreach, letting a lean team move faster without burning out.
# Small Business
Aidan McLaughlin, a researcher on OpenAI’s core models team, uses Codex to translate analytical questions into working front-end tools that make training data easier to see, share, and act on. By describing an investigative goal and letting Codex scaffold a browser app, he can iterate quickly on dashboards that would have taken weeks to build by hand, even without deep front-end experience. In one recent project, an end-to-end visualization surfaced a previously ambiguous signal clearly enough to shift the team from asking whether it existed to deciding how to train on it, spawning a new line of training techniques. Codex also reduces day-to-day friction by helping him navigate and explain unfamiliar parts of the codebase, accelerating alignment and experiment design across collaborators.
# workforce
Facing a tight two-week window to sell out a leadership summit in Bangkok, Woody Milintachinda turned to GPT-5 for a practical growth plan. After reviewing his public-facing materials, the model produced a detailed, step-by-step strategy he could share immediately with partners and staff, giving the team clearer next actions and renewed confidence. Woody then extended the workflow to content acceleration, using GPT-5 to extract podcast highlights, turn them into short-form scripts with captions, and align posts with what was trending on Thai social media. The result is a faster path from insight to execution, adding AI-driven planning and distribution to the toolkit of one of Thailand’s best-known hosts and producers.
# workforce