The Founders Loop exists to move that number. More small and medium businesses adopting AI, and doing it right.
Twelve percent of Canadian businesses used AI to produce goods or deliver services in 2025. Up from 6 percent the year before. The number is doubling. The 88 percent know they need to.1 They are reading the headlines. They are feeling the pressure. They are being told by every consultant in town to leverage AI without anyone actually showing them how.
This is the gap. Not a knowledge gap. An access gap. Access to peers doing the same work. Access to working sessions, not panels. Access to a room where it is okay to say "I don't know what RAG means" without losing credibility.
The Founders Loop exists to move that number. Founder by founder. Cohort by cohort. Doing it right means with peers, with practice, with the right context, on real businesses. Not in a webinar with 800 strangers. Not in a workshop run by someone who has never run a business.
I run Segmentide, which means I see inside dozens of businesses every year. Caterers, retailers, healthcare practitioners, manufacturers, professional services firms, women-led businesses across more industries than I can count.
What they have in common is what they don't have. Not the systems. Not the data. Not the peer rooms. Not the AI literacy. Not the infrastructure that enterprises take for granted.
They have the craft. They have the customers. They have the operations running on willpower and Post-it notes. They are doing real work in real markets, and the technology layer that would compound their effort is missing. Not because they don't want it. Because no one ever showed them how to layer it on while still running the business.
And the women I work with are usually working harder than the men, with less access to the rooms that would have helped them ship faster.
I am building The Founders Loop because the rooms I needed when I was starting out didn't exist. Because I have watched my own clients, brilliant women running real businesses, get talked over in rooms where they were the smartest person there.
Because the next generation of founders, the ones I want my daughter to grow up watching, will only exist if the technology layer becomes available to people who don't already know how to ask for it.
Because I am tired of attending conferences where AI is discussed as if it's some abstract future thing, while the women catering the lunch in the back are running businesses that could be ten times more successful if anyone bothered to bring them into the conversation.
The room is the answer. Curated, recurring, peer-led, technology-fluent, intentionally majority women. Not because women need to be siloed. Because the rooms that already exist are not balanced, and a 70 percent women room produces different conversations than a 70 percent men room. Better ones, in my experience.
Closing the gap between what enterprises have and what small businesses, especially women's businesses, can access.
That's the sentence I want on the headstone. Not as poetry. As a measurable outcome over the next ten years.
Twelve percent today. The room exists to move that number, founder by founder, cohort by cohort, edition by edition of the publication, edition by edition of The Index. Not a slogan. A line on a graph that keeps going up.
I don't know how big this gets. I know the rhythm. Second Saturday, every month, until the room either becomes the standard or proves it didn't deserve to.
I'm Keerthana Mahadevan, founder of Segmentide and Regional Director of AI Collective Canada. I have spent the last several years building digital ecosystems for small and medium businesses that big agencies wouldn't take the call from.
The Founders Loop is what happens when you spend that long inside SMB rooms and decide the rooms themselves need an upgrade.
It's not my room. It's the founders' room. My job is to keep the curation honest, the loop running, and the door open to anyone doing real work.
Closing the gap.
Cohort by cohort.