Upcoming Events
STAY TUNED…
PAST EVENTS
WEDNESDAY, JULY 29, 2026
11:30a.m. – 2:00p.m.
Join us for a co-hosted luncheon event in partnership with the Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce.
Winning the Next Decade: AI, Workforce, and Economic Development at the Regional Level delves into how AI is not a tech story. It is a workforce story, a business strategy story, and an economic development story, all unfolding at once.
Drawing on years of hands-on AI implementation work with small businesses across the Greater Philadelphia region as the Temple SBDC’s AI specialist, her 13 years of experience working in the small business community, and her role on the Pennsylvania SBDC network’s AI Committee, Isabel Krome will lay out what small business owners and regional leaders actually need to understand — and do — right now.
Three questions anchor the talk. Why do so many small business AI efforts fail, and what does success actually require? How is AI reshaping workforce demands and worker experiences at the regional level? And what should business owners, chambers, and economic development professionals do this year to position their businesses and communities to win the next decade?
Practical, regionally grounded, and built for leaders who make real decisions.
Isabel Krome, Associate Director joined the Temple University Small Business Development Center as a Business Consultant in 2021 and has helped to launch and grow many businesses over the years, including professional service providers, creative professionals, daycare businesses, cleaning companies, and eCommerce businesses. For the past three years, she has served as the SBDC’s AI specialist, guiding small business owners through practical, results-driven AI adoption, and is a member of the PASBDC’s AI working committee.
Isabel has over a decade of small business development experience. Her work has been wide-ranging, including business model planning, market research, AI implementation, business formalization, accessing capital, strategic planning, diversity certifications, and more. In her AI specialist role, she focuses on helping clients avoid common adoption pitfalls — chasing trendy tools without a clear problem to solve, skipping defined success metrics, and layering AI onto broken processes rather than redesigning them — so that implementation translates into measurable business value. She has a BA from Fordham University and an MBA from the Fox School of Business at Temple University.
