Partnering with Tech Goes Home Chattanooga on AI Curriculum

A while back I wrote about wanting to give time back to Chattanooga, and specifically about wanting to serve with Tech Goes Home. That’s now real.

Position5 is partnering with Tech Goes Home Chattanooga to help develop new curriculum aimed at two audiences who keep getting talked past in the AI conversation: small businesses trying to figure out what to actually do with these tools, and community members who deserve more than a marketing pitch when they’re handed something that can change how they work, learn, and look up information.

What we’re building

The curriculum is being designed in two tracks that share the same backbone.

For business development. Small and local businesses are being told AI will transform their operations. Most of them have no framework for evaluating which parts of that are true, which parts are hype, and where the real productivity is hiding. We’re building material that walks owners and operators through where AI actually pays off, where it costs more than it saves, and how to put it to work without betting the business on a vendor’s promises.

For the community. A separate track aimed at the broader community: people who’ll encounter AI whether they sought it out or not. The goal is literacy, not fluency. You don’t have to become a prompt engineer to navigate this safely. You do have to understand what these systems are doing — and just as importantly, what they aren’t.

What we’re teaching

The curriculum is organized around the things people actually need to know, not the things that are fun to demo:

• Hallucinations. Why models confidently make things up, how to spot it, and why a fluent-sounding answer is not the same as a correct one.
• Bias. Where it comes from in training data, how it surfaces in outputs, and what reasonable skepticism looks like in practice.
• Operational safety. How to put AI into a real workflow without breaking the things around it. When a human has to stay in the loop. What to never automate without a check.
• Data security. What you’re actually sharing when you paste a document into a chatbot. How to think about consumer tools vs. enterprise ones. What questions to ask before trusting a vendor with sensitive data.

This isn’t fear-based. AI is genuinely useful, and we say so. But “useful” and “safe to use without thinking” are two very different sentences, and a lot of the public material out there blurs them.

A special module: Quantum in Chattanooga

There’s one more piece we’re particularly excited about: a dedicated module on quantum computing in Chattanooga and why it matters here, specifically.

Chattanooga isn’t an accidental dot on the quantum map. The city has been quietly building the infrastructure — including the kind of high-speed and quantum networking work that put us on the national radar — that will make this region one of the few places in the country where quantum stops being a research topic and starts being a local industry. Most residents have no idea this is happening in their own back yard, or what it could mean for the next generation of jobs, education, and economic development here.

The module is designed to explain — in plain language — what quantum actually is, why Chattanooga is positioned the way it is, and why every resident has a stake in what gets built here over the next decade. Not so everyone becomes a quantum engineer. So that no one in this city has to feel like the future is something that’s happening to them instead of with them.

Why this work matters to us

Position5 has always been about putting our engineering to work for the people around us. OpenTN was one piece of that. This is another. When we can use what we know to help our neighbors make better decisions — about their businesses, their data, their privacy, the future of their city — we’d rather do that than not.

More to come as the curriculum takes shape. If you’re connected to Tech Goes Home Chattanooga, or you’ve got context on either the business track or the quantum module that we should know, reach out. The whole point of this work is that it gets better the more of the community is in the room.