The Georgia Business Council held its 2026 Innovation Summit on July 23 at the Clayton State University Innovation Center in Morrow, Clayton County, under the title AI in Action: Adoption with Confidence.
Organizers framed the agenda around a gap that has persisted across the state's small and midsize business community. Interest in artificial intelligence is widespread, but the share of firms running AI in a repeatable production workflow remains far smaller than the share experimenting with it. Sessions ran from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Eastern and concentrated on deployment questions rather than technology overviews.
Clayton County sits directly south of Atlanta and includes a large share of the region's logistics, warehousing and airport-adjacent employment. Holding the event at Clayton State placed it inside a part of metro Atlanta where operational businesses, rather than technology firms, make up most of the employer base.
Programming addressed governance and data handling alongside use cases. For smaller firms without dedicated technology staff, the practical barriers to adoption tend to be vendor selection, data readiness and the absence of an internal owner for the project, rather than the capability of the underlying models.
Georgia's broader artificial intelligence sector continues to expand around Georgia Tech and Midtown Atlanta. Prodia, based in Midtown, raised $15.7 million. Pull Logic, spun out of Georgia Tech research, closed a $3.3 million seed round aimed at retail supply chain problems. Allus AI, a Y Combinator company based in Tech Square, builds vision models for factory floor applications.
Source: SaportaReport - https://saportareport.com/ai-in-action-helping-georgia-businesses-adopt-with-confidence/thought-leadership/small-business/gmsdc/