Where our approach comes from.

Chicago, IL: Noor Aftab, Founder of Skilium.ai, delivered a live training at the University of Chicago's Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation as part of its Business Acumen series. Her session was titled "Build It Right: Operations, Systems, and Scaling."

The session was open to local business owners, Polsky Exchange members and the public. It covered the internal infrastructure that makes growth sustainable: standard operating procedures (SOPs), financial systems, and the move from doing everything yourself to leading a team that does the work.

AI was at the center of the training. Aftab showed how small teams can use AI tools to automate repetitive tasks, draft SOPs, manage customer communications and track finances. She explained how this gives a one- or two-person business the operating capacity of a much larger team.

"Most small businesses don't have a growth problem. They have a systems problem," said Aftab. "AI now lets a founder build the operational backbone of a larger company without the overhead. That's what makes growth sustainable."

Participants left with practical outcomes they could use right away:

Find the bottlenecks: each participant identified the one or two operational bottlenecks holding back their growth.
Draft an SOP: each participant wrote a simple SOP for their most repeated business process.
Plan 90 days: each participant built a 90-day plan for one improvement to their financial, operational or technology systems.

The training reflects Skilium.ai's mission to make AI skills practical and accessible for entrepreneurs, professionals and growing organizations.

Skilium founder Noor Aftab launched the IBM Chicago User Group to bring together business leaders, technologists, data scientists and the wider Chicago ecosystem across the Midwest. The group showed keen interest in making Chicago a technology and quantum hub.