What Can Small Businesses Really Do with Artificial Intelligence? Swiss AI Weeks

You will gain a practical overview of the use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in various areas of application. After an introduction to basic concepts such as large language models (LLMs), small language models (SLMs) and multimodal AI systems (text, image, audio, video), you will learn about current tools, methods and application scenarios.

There will be a special focus on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) – a technique in which AI models are enhanced with external knowledge, often eliminating the need for time-consuming fine-tuning.

In the practical part, you will integrate an AI interface into your own code, perform individual queries and gain insights into typical workflows.

In addition, ethical, technical and social aspects will be briefly highlighted in order to better understand the technology.

Discover how small businesses can implement AI through practical examples from recruitment, sales automation and reporting. In this hands-on workshop, you will learn how to develop AI solutions without technical knowledge, external platforms or large budgets, while maintaining data sovereignty and positive impact.

You will gain practical knowledge to implement readily available AI tools, transform your processes and retain control over your data. Perfect for SME owners and managers who want to explore AI without the typical obstacles such as cost and complexity.

In this interactive short workshop, you will learn how prompt engineering can be used as a key technique in generative artificial intelligence (AI) to develop and implement innovative business ideas. After a brief introduction to the basic principles of prompt engineering – including simple practical tips as well as one-shot, few-shot and chain-of-thought prompting – you will immediately apply the methods yourself.

Together, we will discover how creative and precisely formulated prompts can be used to develop tailor-made AI solutions that can help us perform our everyday tasks more efficiently. The aim of the workshop is to enable you to create effective prompts within a very short time and thus actively leverage the potential of AI for innovation development in your company.

In this workshop, you will explore the delicate balance between working with AI and preserving the cognitive work that makes learning sustainable – because sometimes it is precisely the effort that makes the difference.

This workshop teaches the basics of AI. How does (generative) AI work, what are transformer models, and how are large language models (LLMs) developed based on them? The workshop tries to avoid mathematics as much as possible, instead conveying the concepts in a way that allows participants to understand them.

In the second part, we will teach you how LLMs can be used on local devices in compliance with data protection regulations. We will do this using the example of LM-Studio, which enables the use of LLMs on local devices.