This fall, YU Global launches a multi-year initiative to teach Washington Heights high school students to become "AI integrators," young people trained to put artificial intelligence to work for the small businesses in their community. Students begin with the foundations of business, professional communication, AI and prompt engineering, then move into a spring and summer practicum where they are paired with local businesses and apply what they have learned to real problems: reaching new customers, keeping better records, saving owners hours every week. The course offered online with weekly meet ups, carries high school credit, and leads to a paid summer internship. These skills matter because AI is quickly becoming the baseline of working life, and the students who learn to apply it, not just use it, will carry an advantage into college and career. And importantly, the neighborhood benefits as every skill a student builds is put to work locally, in a business that needs it.

While high school students are learning about how to integrate AI into businesses, business owners are attending evening classes to understand AI and how to use it effectively to build infrastructure. The course is being built from input from the neighborhood. Before a single lesson was written, we spent the summer walking Washington Heights with our community partners, the Community Health Academy of the Heights, the Community League of the Heights (CLOTH), and the Washington Heights and Inwood Chamber of Commerce, sitting down with the people who run the neighborhood's bookshops, cafes, restaurants, and family businesses. Every conversation is a structured needs assessment, and the answers are dictating the curriculum. When owners tell us that marketing brings the customers in but inventory and record-keeping are what break, that becomes the syllabus. Students will not arrive with generic exercises; they will arrive with their neighbors' real problems, already mapped and the businesses they help have already helped design the course.

This program is one thread in a longer story: Yeshiva University has long seen Washington Heights not just as its address but as its neighbor, investing in the people and small businesses that make this community what it is. Programs like this one are a reminder that a university's greatest asset isn't its campus, but its willingness to put what it knows to work next door.