Holly Diamond is using artificial intelligence to improve the menu and streamline hiring at her self-described “hole in the wall” Korean barbecue restaurant in Flatiron run by her parents, who speak limited English.
Reuel Williams, a computer science graduate from Princeton, is building AI tools to help musicians improve their work and to protect them from AI-generated ripoffs.
And because of AI, Welcome to Chinatown, a Bowery-based nonprofit that focuses on economic development and cultural preservation, is finally able to conduct timely surveys on the group’s home turf.
“It’s often easy to hear all the negative impacts of AI, but what we actually see is that it has greatly enhanced our capacity, which means we can actually spend more time interacting with our constituents,” said Victoria Lee, co-founder of Welcome to Chinatown.
Vic Lee helps run Welcome to Chinatown out of a small innovation hub on the Bowery, March 3, 2026. Photo: Alex Krales/THE CITY
Fears that artificial intelligence will eliminate tens of millions of jobs dominate much of the conversation about the rapidly evolving technology. Last month Amazon announced it was cutting 16,000 jobs, including several hundred in New York City, as its CEO leans into using AI extensively. The payments company Block announced it eliminated 40% of its workforce last week because of AI efficiencies.
But in New York another side of the AI story is playing out as many small businesses and organizations use it to become more efficient without eliminating jobs. Their stories are also emblematic of the way New York individuals and organizations are adopting AI more enthusiastically than the rest of the country with a survey by Anthropic released earlier this year showing only Washington, D.C., is adopting AI more aggressively.
“Early data shows that New Yorkers are adopting AI more quickly than people in other cities, and I’m not surprised because New York is filled with ambitious, hard working people that are always trying to do more than less,” said Julie Samuels, executive director of the trade group Tech:NYC.
The trend is being spurred by training organized by key business and trade groups. Diamond, for example, received six weeks of training through a Manhattan Chamber of Commerce program called Tech to Table that teaches using AI for inventory management, sales and cost tracking, staffing and marketing strategies. The program is supported by Google, and restaurant owners receive a $5,000 grant upon completion.
More ambitious is the Decoded Futures program now under the auspices of the Tech:NYC Foundation, which has trained three cohorts of 25 nonprofits in an eight-week program in which the members get together to work on projects with a tech mentor. A fourth group began meeting last month. Decoded has been heavily supported by the Robinhood Foundation, Google and other tech companies.
“A big driver for getting into the program was that I was using AI, but my chief operating officer was not,” recalled Lee. “I could bring her and start to teach her how to use AI.”
Lee considers herself technologically adept and began using the AI tool ChatGPT to help with her ADHD, which paralyzes her when confronted with a task and a blank document. By discussing the project with ChatGPT, she is able to push ahead. She’s moved on to Anthropic’s Claude.
Before AI, Welcome to Chinatown would send volunteers across the neighborhood to do interviews with paper and pen to see what businesses had opened and closed, what spaces were vacant or what people said they needed help with. But the group, with six full time staff members and three part timers, didn’t have the resources to actually do anything with the data.
Vic Lee helps run Welcome to Chinatown out of a small innovation hub on the Bowery, March 3, 2026. Photo: Alex Krales/THE CITY
Using Claude, at a cost of $322 per month, Welcome to Chinatown has plumbed city data to create a data set that divides the neighborhood into zones. Volunteers then walk that area and use their phones to plug in key information on changes.
“We can approach a new business and say ‘Hey, welcome to Chinatown.’ Or if there is a vacancy we can alert entrepreneurs who we know are looking for spaces,” Lee says.
Welcome to Chinatown also manages an event space but keeping track of it involves making entries in four different systems, since sophisticated enterprise software costs far more than it can afford. So Lee built a tool in which she fills out one form which then coordinates entries in the systems. What used to take 15 minutes or more is now done in a couple of minutes.
Holly Diamond’s livelihood is being a recruiter, mostly for companies from Korea. She opened Mista Oh, the Flatiron barbecue restaurant, so her parents, who had worked in food hospitality in Korea, would be able to put those skills to use in New York. But their English is limited, and the business has had difficulty reaching profitability.
Holly Diamond, whose parents own a Korean restaurant in Flatiron, created a AI human resources app to help people find restaurant jobs in NYC, March 3, 2026. Photo: Alex Krales/THE CITY
Diamond, who also has ADHD, first used AI to proofread and correct the menu, which she finds difficult because of her disability. She built another tool that provides detailed answers when people call with questions about the restaurant.
But her key innovation involved using AI to deal with the high turnover for staff since neither her parents nor many of the people applying were proficient in English.
Now, when applicants call to inquire, they are given a series or prompts so they can use their native language and answer questions. Then the tool creates a basic PDF resume for review. And when her mother needs to hire someone, the system allows her to create a detailed job posting in English which can be posted on job sites.
Very small startup businesses are also carving a role with AI. Williams may be a recent math and computer science graduate of Princeton, but he’s also a jazz pianist and is proficient on the steelpan, the national instrument of his home country of Trinidad and Tobago.
“So after graduation I started thinking about how I could meld those two worlds. I started Cai.audio to allow independent musicians to use AI in a way that does not take away their autonomy or replace them but allows them to improve their workflow,” he said.
He runs Cai with a fellow Princeton grad and three part-time engineers. Their first product is a suite of tools that allows musicians to adjust individual notes and chords, which he said is far more flexible than other available programs.
He’s also partnered with an upstate charter school on a program to help students learn how to compose music using technology. And he is at work on a program that helps independent musicians deal with people who steal their music to post as their own.
Cai was founded as part of Techstars, a well-known accelerator that has provided funding so far. Now Williams is out raising more money to allow him to continue his work.
Welcome to Chinatown’s work has been so successful, it has been named the lead for an AI training program to be offered to small businesses through the other 25 New York Entrepreneur Assistance Centers in the state.
Diamond’s tool has been getting a lot of attention from community-based organizations and is sharing it—for free.
“The tiny tool we built has over 15,000 businesses and job seekers using it,” she said.