STARTUPS CENTRAL

Jacqueline Gathers took over a Brooklyn home inspection franchise after her husband’s death and transformed a personal loss into a profitable local enterprise. Having spent three decades with the New York City Housing Authority, Gathers earned her New York State inspector license and reopened the operation her husband had been setting up, launching the business in 2018. She framed the move as both a way to preserve his work and a second act in her own career, stepping into an

Cooks and bartenders from coffee shops to fine-dining rooms say cinnamon is moving beyond pie plates and holiday drinks, showing up in savory entrees, cocktails and vegetarian dishes year-round. Across several cities, restaurant managers report a steady uptick in dishes that use ground bark from the cinnamon tree, and diners are taking notice. The shift, chefs say, is driven partly by a search for familiar flavors with fresh twists — think spiced rubs for meat, warm notes in

BERO’s operations team replaced hand-coded data plumbing with a single, company-wide application that pulls together sales, HR and contract records and answers employees’ questions on demand. The platform, designed and launched in weeks, now draws from more than 800 data tables and over 60 third-party connections, and includes a conversational assistant people across the company can query for reports or status updates. Access controls limit sensitive views, and the system per

A short, practical playbook for keeping customer-facing bots useful: feed them the right information, watch how they behave, and update them regularly. Too many local shops and service providers rush to add conversational tools thinking they’ll instantly shoulder customer inquiries. They won’t — not unless someone prepares the knowledge those systems draw on. The most urgent task for business owners isn’t buying a fancy interface; it’s organizing the facts, policies and answe

AI Helpers Tailor Study Plans, Recommend Resources and Shift Corporate Training — But They Also Raise Trust and Quality Questions AI-powered assistants are altering how adults pick up new skills, from weekend hobbyists to employees in large firms. Companies and individual learners are increasingly treating these tools as collaborators that can evaluate a person’s starting point, assemble a step-by-step curriculum and adapt materials as competence grows. Recent industry analys

He turned a lone tow truck into a business he sold to private investors and is now using the proceeds to coach and bankroll neighborhood entrepreneurs. Early Walker, a Chicago native who launched his first serious venture in 2013, created No Business Left Behind to provide mentorship, operational help and access to capital for small businesses in areas often overlooked by banks and investors. The program pairs hands-on guidance with storytelling about each company’s progress