Across Nebraska’s startup and business landscape, professionals are exploring artificial intelligence (AI) not as a buzzword but as a tool for solving specific problems and wondering what to do with the technology sweeping through industries. 

Through community meetups, legal forums and hands-on implementation inside startups, people are learning and leveraging AI, and are beginning to shape workflows, products and possibilities across sectors.

Business collaboration: AI tools meet workflow reality

At AI O.NE, a business-focused meetup held throughout the year at the Coach.Win Learning Center, participants exchange insights on practical AI integrations across marketing, operations and internal communications. At a recent session, attendees explored tools like Microsoft Copilot, Decisions AI and Power Automate to streamline everything from meeting documentation to task delegation.

One attendee demonstrated how his team built an automated attendance tracker using Power Automate and ChatGPT in under 30 minutes. Others shared tips for using Otter.ai during travel, managing agendas through Decisions.ai and organizing client notes with PLAUD.

Beyond tools, the group discussed strategic implementation. Companies are forming internal AI committees to test tools department by department. Reverse mentoring, where younger employees train older colleagues on AI platforms, is helping to close knowledge gaps. The meetup also floated the idea of launching a paid peer network for AI leaders to support implementation and share best practices.

AI O.NE organizers say their mission is to help companies turn curiosity into capability. With new tools emerging constantly, business leaders are encouraged to approach AI adoption like product development: iterative, collaborative and guided by real business needs.

Startup spotlight: Maxwell personalizes HR with AI

Omaha-based Maxwell is integrating AI into the heart of its HR technology platform. Co-founded in 2020 by Adriana Cisneros Basulto and Stephen Enke, Maxwell provides employers with a lifestyle spending account (LSA) platform to recognize and retain employees through personalized rewards. AI is helping the team deepen that personalization and run more efficiently.

Cisneros Basulto says she uses Google’s Gemini to research industry trends, draft blog outlines and clean up marketing content. Maxwell is also testing Google’s NotebookLM to distill research into bite-sized podcast scripts for HR leaders. In 2025, the company plans to release monthly episodes exploring employee engagement, retention and benefits innovation.

On the product side, Maxwell is developing “Max,” an AI-powered assistant designed to answer employee questions about their benefits in real time. 

The goal is to reduce HR overhead while making support available 24/7. Cisneros Basulto said they’re training Max to handle questions with contextual accuracy, drawing from user data and behavioral trends to offer meaningful responses.

Maxwell doubled its user base over the last year and remains focused on helping health care and service-sector employers reduce turnover. Cisneros Basulto views AI not as a replacement for people but as a support system that allows her team and clients to focus on high-value human work.

Legal and ethical questions: Navigating AI’s gray areas

The May 7 IDEA Forum hosted by Koley Jessen brought together attorneys, entrepreneurs and corporate leaders to examine how artificial intelligence reshapes law, entertainment and business operations. Speakers covered everything from intellectual property risks to prompt engineering to new creative frontiers in media.

Keynote speaker Eric Shamlin illustrated how AI is lowering costs and compressing production timelines in digital media. He cited Coca-Cola’s Christmas ad, produced in just four weeks using AI tools, as a case study in what’s now possible. Shamlin emphasized that while AI accelerates creation, it still relies on human imagination to define vision and values.

Panelists in the “Future of Creativity” session discussed how AI affects industries like education, law and design. Speakers highlighted new use cases like AI tutors, legal research tools and ideation assistants, while warning of ethical risks such as hallucinated outputs, bias and data misuse.

In a legal briefing titled “AI Legal Quick Hitters,” attorneys broke down the patchwork of U.S. regulations, spotlighting the Federal Trade Commission’s growing involvement and contrasting U.S. policy with stricter approaches in Europe and China. 

Attendees were advised to take proactive steps: label AI use clearly, ensure data privacy and prepare for a rapidly changing legal environment.

Startup spotlight: Doomsun applies AI to equities trading

Doomsun, a newly launched algorithmic trading startup based in Lincoln, uses AI to navigate the complexities of energy transition markets, which involve moving from fossil fuel-based energy sources to adopting low-carbon and renewable energy sources. 

Founded in October, the company trades its capital while building models analyzing renewable energy, battery storage and decarbonization trends. CEO Joe Smith and his team rely on deep learning models, particularly long short-term memory (LSTM) networks, to detect subtle nonlinear patterns in market behavior.

Smith says AI helps Doomsun separate “signal from noise” in volatile sectors. The company also uses sentiment analysis tools to evaluate how news, reports and social media content impact market outlooks. These insights feed into trading strategies designed to exploit inefficiencies in emerging markets.

The Doomsun team, composed of five members with engineering, crypto and fintech backgrounds, takes a cautious but deliberate approach to AI. 

“We’re not just throwing AI at problems,” said Smith. “We use it when it gives us an edge, but we also want to understand how and why it works.”

In the future, Doomsun plans to offer its platform as a SaaS product for institutional investors and roll out a dataset-as-a-service tool that packages energy market insights. Smith emphasized that AI will remain core to the company’s growth, but will always be balanced by human oversight and technical rigor.

Community meetups: Learning through hands-on experimentation

At AI Omaha’s March meetup, Gallup data scientist Anirban Pal presented on how AI is changing the way organizations interpret survey data. Using text analytics tools powered by large language models (LLM), Gallup can extract richer insights from open-ended responses, identifying patterns and themes that traditional analytics often miss. 

Stephen McGill, a technology manager at Gallup, discussed how the company is exploring AI-driven voice technology to enhance customer experience through automated phone conversations.

The meetup drew a mix of data professionals, business leaders and technologists. AI Omaha aims to foster community learning through monthly events highlighting real-world use cases and emerging trends. 

Participants are encouraged to ask questions, share experimentation wins and explore tools like ChatGPT, Power Automate and Otter.ai in low-pressure settings. The group emphasizes that anyone, from novice to expert, can participate in the growing conversation about AI’s role in business.

What’s next: Balancing urgency with responsibility

Across Nebraska’s startup and business communities, AI is no longer seen as optional, but its implementation is far from straightforward. At meetups, conferences and industry events, the message is that companies that don’t begin exploring AI risk falling behind. 

But alongside that momentum is a growing sense of caution.

Business leaders are experimenting, using generative tools for content creation, customer support, research and data analysis. However, many remain hesitant to fully integrate AI into core operations. 

There’s no universal playbook. In legal and policy circles, the regulatory landscape remains cloudy. Highlighted at the Koley Jessen IDEA Forum, there is no comprehensive federal AI law in the U.S. Instead, businesses are navigating a patchwork of guidance from agencies like the Federal Trade Commission and state-level regulations in places like Colorado and Illinois. Concerns around intellectual property, data security and algorithmic bias remain unresolved.

The result is complicated. While leaders are encouraged to act quickly, they are also urged to proceed carefully. Several speakers cautioned against implementing AI simply to stay on trend. Instead, they recommended that businesses first define their goals, assess whether AI is the right tool for the problem and ensure they have processes for accountability and review.

AI is being adopted incrementally in this transitional period, often behind the scenes. Leaders ask thoughtful questions about what AI can and can’t do in their organization. They’re weighing short-term gains against long-term risks, and building the internal capacity to adapt as tools and rules evolve.

Nebraska’s innovation economy seems to be developing the institutional literacy, ethical frameworks and cross-functional collaboration in an effort to make AI work sustainably.