At BYU’s 2026 SMB | ETA Conference, entrepreneurs and AI experts shared lessons on faith-driven business growth, transformative AI strategies, and practical steps for small and medium businesses to stay competitive.
Provo, Utah — March 10, 2026
At the 2026 SMB | ETA Conference, hosted at BYU’s Harmon Conference Center, approximately 400 small and medium-sized business operators, searchers, sellers, and investors gathered for a deep dive into acquisition strategies. This one-day conference—part of the broader Rollins Center entrepreneurial ecosystem, which included optional half-day workshops on buying and selling businesses—offered participants unparalleled insights and networking opportunities. The event specifically targets active business operators and searchers, rather than students, making it a fertile ground for practical, hands-on advice. Many attendees traveled from out of state to participate in the annual gathering.
The Keynote: Entrepreneurship is a Journey of Faith
Ben Manning and Jeff Ferrel, founders of a fast-growing frozen foods company, opened the conference with a story that was as raw as it was inspiring. They spotted an opportunity while managing $350 million in frozen foods at Sam's Club: their wives wanted healthier meal prep options, and nobody was doing frozen meals right.
They raised $1.2 million—but the first year brought zero revenue. Year two: $400K in sales. Today, they’re at $25 million, with $40 million projected.
The path was far from smooth. They faced metal shards in beef, $60,000 of trashed packaging, and the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank exactly when they needed to pay their factory. One founder battled Hodgkin’s lymphoma during the company’s most accelerated growth.
Their advice was simple: faith matters more than optimization. Prayer and scripture study, not another hour of sleep, give you the resilience to keep going. “Just start. Do one thing today to move forward,” they said. Sometimes, a buyer sees your product, loves it, and fast-tracks you to their shelves.
Key Takeaways:
AI Panel: Level One vs. Level Two Thinking
The afternoon AI panel with School AI co-founder Cahlan Sharp, AI marketing strategist Kyle Painter, and BYU professor David Wood delivered a stark warning: if you dismissed AI six months ago, you’re already behind.
Most businesses operate in Level One thinking: they take an existing task and layer AI on top. You write proposals, AI writes them for you, and you review. Useful—but incremental.
Level Two thinking is transformational. David shared a student who built a tool in two weeks that completely eliminated four full-time employees’ work at his father’s shipping company. Not by automating—it eradicated the need for the task entirely. Another professor had accounting students teach an AI to pass the CPA exam instead of lecturing them, dramatically improving learning outcomes.
“We are now at the point to completely reimagine tasks to create something entirely new,” David said.
Kyle Painter experienced this firsthand: a Google algorithm update detecting AI content forced a complete rethink after he achieved 350% traffic growth. Level Two thinking isn’t optional—it’s the difference between catching up and leading.
The Agentic Revolution
If you’re using ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, you’re already working with AI agents. Unlike early LLMs that just predicted text, today’s models can execute code, open calculators, manipulate software, and coordinate across systems.
Think of your business as a body: the LLM is the brain, other software are the organs, and agents are autonomous workers managing workflows at machine speed.
Cahlan Sharp explained: “If you’re building software, imagine your primary user isn’t a human—but an agent executing tasks on behalf of a human.”
Painter described his workflow: agents scrape Google Trends, X, and Reddit for trending topics, automatically generate SEO content in the client’s voice, and post it—all without human oversight. Research, writing, and scheduling compressed into machine speed.
The competitive divide is no longer modest gains. Businesses leveraging agentic AI can outperform others exponentially—potentially a hundredfold—not just two or three times.
What Actually Matters
Knowledge alone is no longer a competitive advantage; your employee’s phone often knows more than you. What remains valuable: community, connection, human judgment, and creativity.
Painter reflected on his own role: “I asked myself, ‘Am I obsolete?’ The answer: not obsolete, but evolved. My job didn’t disappear—it changed. I plan and execute vision at machine speed.”
For businesses facing obsolescence, the question isn’t what AI can do—but what you can do that AI cannot. That’s where strategy lives.
Getting Started
There’s no catching up—everyone is behind. The goal is momentum and adjustment.
Cahlan: “My job isn’t gone—it’s just changed. I’m no longer moving semicolons around to make code compile. I’m planning and executing alongside AI. I’m building faster, differently, and at a scale I never imagined.”
Steps to integrate AI:
For SMBs, expertise isn’t required—curiosity and experimentation are. Identify where your competitive advantage lives and focus there. Everything else is just noise.
Learn more at smb.byu.edu and rollins.byu.edu.