Transformational opportunities await growth-minded entrepreneurs from across Kansas City’s wide range of industries, said Jill Hathaway, noting business leaders from sports tech to roofing, brewing to nutrition counseling, can scale with the right coaching, perspective and connections.

ScaleUP! Kansas City on Monday announced its 15th cohort of 20 local companies looking to create new jobs, open new locations and strengthen the regional economy.

“The program gives top-tier business owners the training, confidence and the network they need to scale the region’s next multimillion-dollar businesses, and I’m glad we can give the next 20 entrepreneurs the opportunity to transform our communities,” said Hathaway, program coordinator for ScaleUP! Kansas City and regional director of the Small Business Development Center at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Now 10 years old, ScaleUP! Kansas City helps entrepreneurs — leading qualified businesses with revenues above $250,000 — create the processes, strategies and long-term plans to not only grow but also to scale their businesses and be prepared for shifts and opportunities, she detailed.

The newest cohort brings the number of companies served to 254, Hathaway added.

“ScaleUP! KC pushes business owners to work on their business and not just in it,” she said. “This program primes some of the region’s standout business owners to clear obstacles and gives them the chance to rework their approach so they can scale.”

Members of ScaleUP! Kansas City’s 15th cohort, inside the Henry W. Bloch School of Management at the University of Missouri-Kansas City; courtesy photo

The new cohort’s members include:

• Jon Balmer (Balmer Roofing and Solar LLC), Tonganoxie, Kansas — A locally woman-owned and operated company specializing in high-quality installs and repairs throughout the Midwest.

• Ebony Black (Connect Staffing and Professional LLC), Kansas City, Missouri — Delivers staffing and recruiting for business, technology and health care and connects top talent with employers in private and public sectors.

• Jason Blanton (Connected Families Counseling), Kearney, Missouri — Offers outpatient mental health services for children, teens, adults, couples and families.

• Timothy Carlson (Five Star Painting), Kansas City, Missouri — Offers interior and exterior painting for residential and commercial properties.

• Piercyn Charbonneau (HOODZ of Kansas City), Grandview, Missouri — Specializes in NFPA 96 compliant commercial kitchen exhaust inspection and cleaning.

• Lupemaria Guzman (Marquez & Marquez LLC), Kansas City, Kansas — Offers expert home services, including TV mounting, security camera installs, furniture assembly and art hanging.

• Reed Hastings (Scratch Office Catering), Kansas City, Missouri — Delivers fresh, crowd-pleasing meals for meetings and events, making office catering easy and reliable in Kansas City.

• Tania Hewett-Mader (Alma Mader Brewing), Kansas City, Missouri — Specializes in award-winning, hop-forward ales and lagers and barrel-aged treats, with a steadfast dedication to perfecting every batch.

• Ariel Johnston (The Tasty Balance Dieticians), Prairie Village, Kansas — A group practice of registered dietitians offering in person and virtual nutrition counseling and corporate wellness programs.

• Alan Kneeland (The Combine), Kansas City, Missouri — A restaurant on Kansas City’s east side that caters to everyone.

• Mark Messner (Rendezvous Climbing Gym), Leawood, Kansas — A new climbing gym that caters to all skill levels.

• Delshay Pearson (Dynamic Unity Home Care), Kansas City, Missouri — Provides in-home care and CDS services, empowering clients to live independently with dignity in Kansas City, Missouri.

• Jacob Petersen (Redgate Disposal), Edgerton, Missouri — A family-owned trash business that provides residential and commercial trash services with a quality that is second to none.

• Linda Pizzato (Linda’s Cleaning Service LLC), Kansas City, Missouri — Focuses on residential recurring cleaning as well as deep cleaning, move in/move out cleaning and office cleaning.

• Alex Reed (GolfTRK), Lenexa, Kansas — A modern indoor golf facility where avid players can practice, play and improve year-round in a high-tech environment.

• Brenda Romo (R&C Framing), Raymore, Missouri — Builds strength where it matters most, delivering precision-crafted framing and exterior construction that stands the test of time.

• William Thomas (IT Recycling Answers), Lee’s Summit, Missouri — Helps companies decommission IT equipment. The company has two service offerings: Items that are end-of-life are recycled, and items with value are sold.

• Citlali Valdez (City’s Cleaning Crew LLC), Kansas City, Missouri — A trusted cleaning service specializing in residential and commercial cleaning across the Kansas City area.

• Corey Weinfurt (O’Malley’s of Weston LLC), Weston, Missouri — A brewery, pub, restaurant and three lodging locations in Weston, Missouri, operated by Corey Weinfurt and his team. The company’s primary location is the site of the Weston Brewing Co. from 1842.

• Dave Wowak (J and J Screen), Grandview, Missouri — For 58 years, J and J has repaired and fabricated new residential window screens, replaced broken glass and installed new porch screens.

ScaleUP! KC is funded by the Missouri SBDC at UMKC, a program of the UMKC Innovation Center, and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. UMKC Innovation Center staff provide coaching and administrative support.

The program is administered by the UMKC Innovation Center, which also operates the Missouri Small Business and Development Center, Technology Venture Studio, Missouri Apex Accelerator, University of Missouri Extension, SourceLink, MOSourceLink and KCSourceLink.

• New Philips Hue products have been leaked
• There are 4 new lights plus a hub and a doorbell
• It’s not clear when they might launch

We’re expecting some new Philips Hue smart lights in the not-too-distant future, and it seems the Signify-owned brand has got so excited about the upcoming products that it’s leaked them early on its own website.

Pages listing the new devices were only live briefly, but before they got pulled they were spotted by Hueblog (via Android Authority). There are apparently four new models coming, plus a Hue Bridge update and a new video doorbell.

Nearly three years after the public launch of ChatGPT catalyzed a groundswell of generative artificial intelligence adoption, levels of AI maturity within the sports industry vary widely.

Where most organizational leaders agree, however, is that reconciling this transformative and constantly evolving technology is a core business priority, particularly in investigating ways it can streamline operations. And this emphasis comes from the top down.

“One of [our five biggest company objectives] is master AI to boost efficiency and impact,” X Games CEO Jeremy Bloom recently told Sports Business Journal. “That is a leg on the stool, it’s not a peripheral goal or an afterthought.”

Internal efficiency-focused AI use cases are not always flashy, nor directly revenue generating. They run the gamut of areas such as segmenting fan data, drafting communications and employee onboarding, and are increasingly tapping agentic workflows, a class of artificial intelligence that is more autonomous — meaning minimal or no human intervention — and layered in its decision making than large language models, and can act on behalf of users.

The empirical benefits of AI in these contexts remain theoretical in some cases, but tech leaders center their efforts on increasing productivity and freeing understaffed departments to focus on big picture priorities, rather than mundane daily tasks.

Everyone is different

Enamored with the potential impact of AI on the sports industry, Josh Walker, co-founder and CEO of data firm Sports Innovation Lab, earlier this year launched a sports-focused AI education program called AI Advantage. With two of four planned sessions completed, the program has assembled hundreds of industry professionals — split evenly among teams/leagues, brands/agencies and media/technology companies, in Walker’s estimation — to learn more about AI and investigate potential use cases through presentations and product demos.

The biggest trend he has noticed with how sports teams and leagues are adopting AI?

“There is no pattern,” Walker said. “It would make perfect sense for the leagues to centralize the services that they are building for AI and roll it out to the teams. The teams never wait for that. You have some enterprising data science team or some enterprising CTO at the team level — they’re going to try stuff faster than the leagues do.”

Professional basketball is a hotbed of such enterprising teams.

The Cleveland Cavaliers, according to Michael Conley, the team’s executive vice president and chief information officer and president of Rock Entertainment Sports Network, began their generative AI discovery 3½ years ago. This started by consulting tech experts on the potential impact of generative AI and forming a cross-departmental generative AI committee. Eventually, they even transitioned one of their data quality analysts, Ben Levicki, into a full-time AI solutions architect, a first in the sports industry.

Since then, the Cavs have found success in initial use cases, such as building a semantic search function for the team’s basketball operations manual and a generative AI insights layer for their real-time ticket, food and beverage and retail data platform. At the direction of their C-suite, they are now focused on automating elements of their external communications, streamlining the processing of internal fan data and personalizing fan interaction.

During the NBA’s first Data Strategy Forum in July, the team presented the working prototype of a custom-built product that leverages a network of AI agents and fan information to distribute individualized emails to subscribers, down to details such as color scheme and emoji usage. After further testing using real fan profiles in September, the Cavs’ plan is for the product to be a part of email workflows by the start of the 2025-26 NBA season.

“Our goal is to be able to increase the amount of engagement that comes off a click action for those emails, to be able to eventually lead to better results down the funnel,” Conley said. “Is the messaging more effective, where we’re seeing greater open rates? Are we seeing greater engagement?”

Elsewhere, the Indiana Fever have seen potential in deploying AI agents (via Salesforce’s Agentforce platform) to comb through and segment internal fan data, which Joey Graziano, Pacers Sports & Entertainment executive vice president of strategy and new business ventures, said will help the team deliver personalized offers, content and experiences to fans and eventually be a resource for partners as well.

This is a massive potential use case in sports, given the multifaceted nature of fan data and ability for AI to scale the capabilities of understaffed data engineering departments.

“We are getting more sophisticated every day,” Graziano said. “And it’s not just the sophistication, it’s the speed and it’s the volume of segments you can create.”

The San Antonio Spurs, as a unique example, are using OpenAI to train models on previous years’ travel calendars (and other custom rules) to ingest the NBA’s overarching schedule and create deliverables such as team-specific master calendars, flight charters and email templates for outreach to preferred hotels and practice facilities on the road.

Human oversight is required, of course, but Charlie Kurian, the team’s director of business strategy and innovation, said tests have shown that first iterations of the deliverables can be produced in about 20 minutes, with the end-to-end, manual process of inputting information into Excel block-by-block distilled from three weeks to, at worst, one. He anticipates a version of the technology will aid the Spurs’ schedule-making as early as this season.

“This came directly from our CEO,” Kurian said. “[The message was], ‘Our people need to be focused on the higher ROI items. How do we use AI to deal with some of these tasks we’re bogged down with?’”

Culture matters

Kurian, at the head of the Spurs’ AI adoption effort, often says the first step of building a company’s “AI muscle” is enabling an AI-empowered workforce.

“We still believe we are very, very early on in the AI revolution. It’s hard to tell who is going to win, and what is going to stick,” Kurian said, comparing the current marketplace of competing AI platforms to the early days of social networking. “But what we can undoubtedly say is this technology will absolutely stick for the foreseeable future. [We’re] making sure we have invested in the most important thing we have — which is our people — so that, agnostic of what tool it comes to, we will still win.”

The team put this focus into action last year by piloting a generative AI learning program using ChatGPT, which has led to 90% of the 150 participants adopting the technology on a week-to-week basis, according to Kurian.

“We’ve crossed a threshold in people broadly using AI tools,” he said. “Now we’re doing discovery across every single department in our organization, understanding workflows, and, in the most positive way, blowing up the workflows to be able to integrate where AI can add value so that the real human beings can focus on the best use of their resources.”

Across its properties, TKO also is undertaking a hands-on approach to AI discovery and education, according to Alon Cohen, executive vice president of innovation. He and Melanie Hildebrandt, TKO and WME Group’s CIO, brought in an advanced prompt engineer for hands-on AI training with “natural early adopters” (e.g., TKO’s innovation and IT teams), and are now looking for other areas the technology can provide business value.

“The next version of almost every business application that we use has a heavy AI component to it,” Cohen said. “So, every team is identifying places where they think they can be successful, and when they go through their next upgrade cycle — or we consolidate to a new tool that’s also a good moment for an upgrade cycle — those tools become available.”

X Games encourages its staff to dedicate 10% of their working hours to experiment with AI tools that could boost productivity, Bloom said. One particularly effective use case has been in training a model on droves of internal data to be a resource for new hires on everything from finding sales deck templates to signing up for benefits.

“The company that I founded before [joining X Games], we had 600 employees, so we had really big and built-out functions across all these specific areas,” Bloom said, referring to the software startup Integrate. “[At] X Games, we have like 30 full-time employees. Necessity is the mother of invention for us.”

Reason for optimism

Across virtually all corporate industries, there is palpable and understandable anxiety about the potential for AI to replace certain job functions.

Bloom, for one, noted that the AI startup he recently launched, Owl AI — which offers AI-powered competition judging, data processing and broadcast commentary capabilities, including for X Games — is leveraging AI agents for market research, effectively substituting for an internal team or expensive third-party consulting firm.

However, he views live sports as not just insulated from automation, but potentially a benefactor of it.

“AI is going to disrupt so many jobs and so many industries,” Bloom said. “But I think the tailwind for us, and for any sport, is humans are still going to want to watch humans play football, and not want to watch robots play football. I think that is a huge tailwind for X Games, for the NFL, for Major League Baseball, basketball. I think it’s one of the big reasons we’re seeing so much private equity want to get into sports.”

• Two new leaks claim future Garmin watches will be getting LTE connectivity
• This feature allows you to add smartwatches to a data plan, allowing you to make calls and stream without a phone
• It’s a feature included on Apple and Samsung watches, usually on more expensive models

Two new leaks claim we could soon be able to make calls, stream music and answer texts from some of the best Garmin watches yet to be announced – even without an attached phone.

Yes, LTE connectivity is coming to Garmin watches, according to separate reports from leak sites Garmin Rumors and The5Krunner. Garmin Rumors partnered with a site called AppSensa, which digs into code to discover in-development features. Garmin is reportedly going “all-in” into cellular connectivity, according to the site.

The Tupelo based company makes sensors for government and commercial clients

TUPELO, MISS. (WCBI) – The award naming Hyperion Technology Group as Tech Manufacturer of the Year was presented by the RISE Center at the University of Mississippi.  The Center offers resources for small businesses across the state.

“The purpose at the RISE Center is to help high-growth companies, which are scaling up. We can be specific in our counseling for those type businesses,” said Chip Templeton, Director of The RISE Center.

Hyperion Technology Group was founded in 2009 with five employees. The company provides state-of-the-art, custom electronic systems for government and commercial clients in the United States and worldwide.

Chad Williams, president and CEO of Hyperion, says the award is a testimony to the high-tech company.

“I feel a lot of gratitude for all the folks who help along the way,  those who work here, work hard and try to make the company into something that is productive and profitable, strength and health to continue for many years to come,” Williams said.

Hyperion’s award not only shows the importance of innovation, but also the importance of teamwork among public and private organizations at the local, state, and national levels.

“We have had a partnership with them for several years; they rent a building we own, and another one is some technology they provide us as far as some data we have in our community. It is a great recognition for them,” said Tupelo Mayor Todd Jordan.

Hyperion now has around sixty employees at its Tupelo location.

Hyperion also has an office in Gulfport.

For more information, visit their website at hyperiontg.com.

For 24/7 news and updates, follow us on Facebook and X.

New to ClassAction.org? Read our Newswire Disclaimer