Detroit businesses helped since 2016, about 90% minority owned
For a decade, the University of Michigan's Detroit Neighborhood Entrepreneurs Project has done quiet, unglamorous work: pairing Detroit small business owners with students and faculty who can help with the parts of a business that do not show up on a storefront sign. Marketing. Accounting. Law. Technology. Strategy. The program has assisted nearly 1,700 businesses since 2016, serves about 350 a year, and roughly 90% of those businesses are minority owned.
Now DNEP is doing something that could matter even more. It is teaching neighborhood founders how to use AI, and it is starting to build tools specifically for them.
The gap it is closing is real. The tools that let a company forecast cash flow, tighten inventory, or read its own financials at a glance have mostly lived inside businesses that can afford a finance team. A founder running a shop, a studio, or an online store is usually the CEO and the CFO and the shipping department all at once. DNEP's answer is a CFO dashboard, launching soon, that lets a business owner enter their financial data and have AI pull out the insights, no business degree required.
"Grit and gut feelings will get you started. But if you want to turn a business into a legacy or an anchor in a neighborhood, you need data and you need other people's money."
That line comes from Christie Baer, DNEP's managing director, and it captures the whole idea. The program moved to the Ross School of Business in 2024 to sharpen its focus on entrepreneurship and technology. A grant from Engage Detroit seeded its first AI workshops. A corporate sponsor donated 120 licenses to a platform that bundles dozens of AI agents in one place, which made teaching the skills far faster. From there, DNEP started building: a legal and regulatory bot for Detroit daycares, and the CFO dashboard on the way.
The human story underneath it is DaNita Weddle. After a workforce reduction cut her healthcare job during the pandemic, she leaned on a skill her aunt taught her at age 10 and launched The LuvGluv, a Detroit company that makes leather gloves with interchangeable charms so customers can carry symbols of family, faith, and cause. She knew how to design and how to sell. What she did not have was the back office. DNEP students built her market research and rebuilt her inventory system, work she later used to apply for grants. In 2025 the company did 32 events and about $20,000 in sales, up 13% from its first year, and she is now eyeing partnerships with Black sororities and fraternities.
For the young builders ANF covers, this is the part worth paying attention to. The story of AI has mostly been told from the top, about the companies raising the biggest rounds and shipping the flashiest products. The quieter version, the one that actually reshapes a city, is when those same tools reach the block: the maker, the corner shop, the founder working nights on a laptop. Access has always been the real gap, not talent. When the tools the boardroom guards finally reach the neighborhood, the near future gets a lot more crowded, in the best way.
That is the work. And in Detroit, it is already underway.