By: Natalie Pineiro
Executive Director,
Downtown New Jersey 

How artificial intelligence can help small downtown teams work smarter, stretch limited resources and spend more time on the work that actually requires a human.

Ask almost any downtown manager what they need more of and you will probably hear the same two answers: time and staff.

Downtown organizations are notoriously lean. A team of one, two or three people may be responsible for business recruitment, merchant outreach, events, social media, grant administration, board meetings, beautification, sponsorships, data collection, newsletters—and whatever unexpected issue walks through the door that morning.

Adding another employee may not be in the budget.

But what if you could add a research assistant? A junior designer? A data analyst? A translator? A meeting note-taker?

Increasingly, you can.

Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming less of a novelty and more of a practical workplace tool. For downtown organizations—where small staffs routinely perform the work of much larger departments—that presents a particularly interesting opportunity.

The trick isn’t figuring out how to “use AI.”

It’s figuring out which jobs you should give it.

So, meet your newest staff.

The Intern: ChatGPT

Every office needs the person you can hand almost anything to.

That’s where ChatGPT can be particularly useful.

Think of it as the generalist on your AI team. It can help draft a grant narrative, brainstorm an event campaign, analyze a spreadsheet, summarize documents, develop survey questions, conduct web research, create an image or turn a pile of meeting notes into an organized action plan.

The quality of the work depends heavily on the assignment. “Write a social media post about our downtown” will probably produce something generic. Give it your audience, goals, previous posts, brand voice and specific information about the campaign, and the result becomes considerably more useful.

For recurring work, ChatGPT’s Projects feature can also keep related conversations, files and instructions together. A downtown organization might maintain separate projects for its annual festival, business recruitment program, board administration and marketing efforts.

And when the dreaded spreadsheet arrives, ChatGPT can analyze Excel and CSV files using ordinary questions rather than formulas.

Upload your merchant survey and ask:

What are the five most common concerns? Which issues appear most frequently among restaurants? How do responses from newer businesses differ from long-established businesses? Create three charts we can present to the board.

That’s the kind of assignment that might once have eaten up an afternoon.

Put it to work on: 

First drafts, brainstorming, research, spreadsheets, surveys, reports, presentations, images, planning and everyday administrative tasks.

The Research Assistant: Claude

Sometimes the problem isn’t creating information.

It’s figuring out what to do with way too much of it.

Claude is particularly useful for document-heavy work: reading, synthesizing, comparing and writing from substantial amounts of source material.

And downtown professionals certainly aren’t lacking for source material.

Think master plans. Redevelopment plans. Parking studies. Strategic plans. Market studies. Consultant reports. Grant guidelines. RFPs. Board packets.

Instead of spending hours bouncing between documents, you might provide Claude with your downtown master plan, strategic plan, merchant survey and recent board materials and ask:

Identify every recommendation related to business recruitment. Organize them by priority, note where the documents agree or conflict, and identify which recommendations appear to have already been implemented.

Suddenly, the mountain of PDFs becomes much more manageable.

Claude overlaps considerably with ChatGPT, and either platform can perform many of the same tasks. The point isn’t that every downtown organization needs subscriptions to both. Rather, organizations doing a lot of long-form reading, synthesis and writing may want to test both and determine which fits their workflow.

Put it to work on: 

Plans, studies, lengthy reports, strategy development, policy documents, grant guidelines and document-heavy writing.

The Librarian: NotebookLM

The research assistant reads everything.

The librarian knows exactly where the answer came from.

NotebookLM from Google is particularly interesting for organizations that routinely work from established source documents.

Users create a notebook and provide the materials they want the AI to work from—documents, PDFs, websites and other sources. NotebookLM can then answer questions based on those materials and point users back to the supporting sources.

Imagine creating a notebook containing your master plan, parking study, redevelopment plans and zoning materials.

Six months later, someone asks:

“Didn’t the parking study recommend changing the time limits on Main Street?”

Instead of hunting through a 170-page PDF, ask the notebook.

For downtown organizations that accumulate years of plans and studies, this can effectively turn a digital filing cabinet into a searchable knowledge base.

Put it to work on: 

Master plans, redevelopment plans, studies, legislation, grant guidelines, consultant reports and organizational archives.

The Junior Designer: Canva

Every downtown organization eventually becomes a small advertising agency.

There are event flyers, business spotlights, Instagram posts, sponsor graphics, newsletters, presentations, posters and about 14 different sizes of the same graphic.

Canva remains especially useful for this kind of everyday production because it combines templates, brand controls, collaborative editing and increasingly sophisticated AI tools in a platform designed for non-designers.

Its AI features can help generate design concepts, create and edit images, develop copy and adapt creative materials into different formats.

That doesn’t mean AI suddenly makes everyone a graphic designer. Typography, hierarchy, composition and brand judgment still matter.

Where Canva becomes valuable is production at scale.

Create the campaign direction once, establish the brand, and then use the platform to help turn that concept into the Facebook graphic, Instagram post, Story, event flyer and presentation slide your organization inevitably needs.

For organizations with professional designers, Adobe’s Creative Cloud and Firefly offer a more advanced creative environment. And general AI tools such as ChatGPT can be excellent for generating original visual concepts and editing images before those assets move into the final design workflow.

Put it to work on: 

Social graphics, event promotion, presentations, campaign adaptations and everyday branded materials.

The Note-Taker: Otter.ai

There is a particular form of downtown-manager multitasking that involves facilitating a board meeting while simultaneously taking minutes and trying to remember who just volunteered to call the property owner.

There is a better way.

Otter.ai can record and transcribe meetings and generate summaries and action items.

For downtown organizations, that makes it useful for board and committee meetings, merchant roundtables, stakeholder interviews, planning sessions and internal meetings.

Instead of concentrating on capturing every sentence, staff can participate in the discussion and use the transcript afterward to prepare minutes, follow-up emails and task lists.

Organizations should, of course, establish appropriate practices around recording consent, access, retention and sensitive conversations.

Put it to work on: 

Board meetings, committee meetings, stakeholder sessions, interviews and action-item tracking.

The Data Analyst: ChatGPT + Placer.ai

Downtown organizations collect an enormous amount of data.

The problem is that much of it ends up sitting in spreadsheets.

ChatGPT can help make ordinary organizational data much more accessible. Upload event registrations, merchant surveys, budgets, pedestrian counts or marketing analytics and ask questions in plain English.

But increasingly, downtown organizations can also analyze something that has historically been much harder to measure: how people actually use a place.

Placer.ai provides location and visitation analytics that can help organizations understand foot traffic, visitation patterns and trade areas.

That opens up much more interesting questions.

Did Saturday’s festival actually increase visitation downtown?

Where are visitors coming from?

What days and times see the strongest activity?

Did visitation change after a major business opened?

Are people attending an event and leaving—or spending time elsewhere downtown?

For districts trying to demonstrate impact, recruit businesses or make the case for investment, those questions matter.

Put them to work on: 

Event measurement, merchant surveys, visitation patterns, trade areas, business recruitment and board reporting.

The Market Analyst: ArcGIS Business Analyst

When a prospective restaurant asks, “Who lives within ten minutes of this storefront?”, a downtown organization should ideally have a better answer than “a lot of people.”

ArcGIS Business Analyst combines demographic, consumer, business and geographic information for market and site analysis.

Increasingly, AI is making those sophisticated datasets easier to navigate using natural-language questions and recommendations.

For downtown organizations, that can be particularly valuable when creating business recruitment packages, analyzing a redevelopment site or helping an entrepreneur understand the market surrounding a potential location.

Pair that information with local knowledge—available storefronts, nearby anchors, planned development and the personality of the district—and suddenly the downtown organization can make a much stronger recruitment pitch.

Put it to work on: 

Demographics, market analysis, site selection, business recruitment, trade areas and economic-development reports.

The Translator: DeepL

Business outreach gets considerably more complicated when your district speaks three, four or five languages.

DeepL provides AI-powered translation for text and complete documents and allows organizations to maintain preferred terminology through features such as glossaries.

That can make everyday multilingual communication significantly easier for a small staff.

Merchant notices, surveys, event information, newsletters and program announcements can all become more accessible without requiring every communication to begin with an outside translation process.

Human review remains important—particularly for legal, regulatory, public-safety or culturally sensitive communications—but AI translation can dramatically lower the barrier to routine multilingual outreach.

Put it to work on: 

Merchant communications, surveys, event information, newsletters and outreach materials.

The Administrative Assistant: Zapier

Now we get to perhaps the least exciting—and potentially most useful—member of the team.

Zapier connects different applications so routine actions can happen automatically.

Consider a typical downtown program:

A business completes an online application.

Someone downloads the information.

Someone adds the business to a spreadsheet.

Someone sends a confirmation email.

Someone creates a follow-up reminder.

Someone adds the contact to an email list.

None of those tasks is particularly difficult.

That’s precisely the problem.

Small administrative tasks quietly consume hours.

With an automation platform, submitting the application can trigger several of those steps automatically. Increasingly, AI also allows users to describe the workflow they want in ordinary language rather than building every automation manually.

Put it to work on: 

Forms, email lists, databases, notifications, applications, follow-ups and repetitive administrative processes.

Don’t Fire the Humans

There is an important caveat to all of this.

AI is remarkably good at producing something that looks finished.

That doesn’t mean it is correct.

AI can misunderstand data, invent facts, misinterpret a document or produce writing that sounds polished while saying very little. A human still needs to review the work.

Privacy matters too. Personnel records, confidential business information, legal matters, personally identifiable information and other sensitive material should not simply be uploaded into an AI platform without understanding how that platform handles data.

Organizations using AI regularly should consider establishing a basic internal policy: Which platforms are approved? What information can be uploaded? What requires human verification? When must AI-generated material be disclosed? Who is ultimately responsible for the finished product?

But perhaps the most important rule is simpler:

Use AI to create more time for people—not less.

The best use of artificial intelligence in downtown management isn’t replacing the downtown manager.

Let AI summarize the spreadsheet.

Let it organize the meeting notes.

Let it produce the first draft.

Let it resize the graphic.

Let it find the recommendation buried on page 147.

Then use the hour you just got back to walk Main Street. Visit a business owner. Meet a property owner. Recruit a volunteer. Talk with a resident. Sit down with an entrepreneur considering your downtown.

Because downtown management has always been fundamentally about relationships.

Your new AI staff may be incredibly fast.

But they still can’t walk downtown.