OpenAI and Booking.com team up to offer free ChatGPT training for small businesses
The SME AI Accelerator series is bringing hands-on ChatGPT training to small and medium business owners with no technical background required, and no cost to attend.
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OpenAI and Booking.com have partnered on a free virtual workshop series designed to give small business owners a practical introduction to using ChatGPT for everyday tasks.
The SME AI Accelerator, run through OpenAI Academy, is a one-hour online session covering prompting fundamentals, business workflow building, and practical applications across marketing, customer service, and operations.
Rajan Patel, a Solutions Engineer at OpenAI, posted about the initiative on LinkedIn, describing it as one of the "real privileges" of his role, helping people take their first steps with AI. He wrote that the session is designed for small business owners and operators who want to "save time, reach more customers, and start seeing real value from AI — without needing any technical background."
What the session covers
The one-hour workshop walks participants through how to use ChatGPT for everyday business tasks including marketing copy, customer messages, and operations. It covers the fundamentals of prompting and guides participants through building a ready-to-use workflow they can apply to their own business immediately after the session.
The session uses worked examples tailored to the kinds of businesses it is designed for: restaurants, shops, service providers, and online sellers. A cafe owner, for example, might build a daily specials planner that drafts social posts; a salon owner might create a message-drafting assistant for client follow-ups. No coding or technical background is required.
The SME AI Accelerator is part of a broader OpenAI Academy program, which is partnering with Booking.com to deliver the virtual workshop series. Patel described Booking.com as a key partner in making the sessions possible, thanking the company directly in his LinkedIn post.
Registration is free for all small businesses. The session is designed to be a fast, accessible entry point into AI skills for business owners who may have access to tools like ChatGPT but have not yet built consistent workflows around them.
