RAIN — Week of August 10, 2026

Ask Amy

Everyone says I should be using AI in my business, but I don't even know what that means. What's a real first thing to try?    Danni in Colorado

Think about your actual Tuesday. Not the parts that feel like your business, the parts that just have to get done before you can get to those parts. The invoices you copy from one program into another. The email inbox you scroll through every morning, sorting the one customer emergency from twelve things that can wait. That drudgery is where AI actually earns its keep.

Get a paid AI account. Connect it to your email, your calendar, or that one spreadsheet that always needs updating. Then tell it, in plain language, what you need done and how often. Let it guide you to create a workflow that handles some of those mundane but necessary tasks.

Small example: a list of customers who haven't paid could become a workflow that drafts the reminder emails and updates their status in your spreadsheet, all without you touching four different pieces of software or hiring someone to configure them for you.

None of this is really about the software or about AI. It's about getting that hour back for the customer on the phone, the project you actually care about, whatever it was that made you want to run this business before the paperwork took over.

You don't need to be super tech savvy for this. You need one annoying task and twenty minutes.

What's the task on your desk right now that you'd hand off first if you could?

Stories of the Week

Patients Wary of Governments, Companies Pushing AI as a Rural Healthcare Solution

Federal health officials are pitching AI nurses and avatars as a rural care fix, and states are spending $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Program dollars on scribes, triage algorithms and chatbots. Only 26 peer-reviewed studies on AI in rural healthcare appeared between 2010 and April 2025.

Patients in Hot Springs, South Dakota told KFF they want a doctor, not a bot, and most state plans track AI adoption rather than outcomes. Ask what your state will measure before the contracts are signed.

Texas Governor Halts Data Center Grid Connections Pending Audit

Gov. Greg Abbott's Aug. 3 order halts new data center grid interconnections until ERCOT and the PUCT audit every project. More than 1,800 projects are in the queue, and roughly 90% of the 474 gigawatts of pending requests come from data centers.

The 4.5-gigawatt Stargate campus sits in rural Abilene county, where local zoning controls are thin. The audit forces disclosure of water sourcing, tax incentives and community impacts, which is leverage rural counties have not had.

[Grant] U.S. National Science Foundation State and Regional Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Hubs

NSF is accepting applications for State and Regional Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Hubs, opportunity number 26-513, with a Nov. 4, 2026 deadline. The program funds shared AI computing and data infrastructure organized at the state and regional level.

Regional consortia are where rural-serving institutions get written in or left out, so land-grant universities, tribal colleges and community colleges should be at the table now. Applications close Nov. 4.

Amazon backs power plant that may become top source of US climate pollution

Amazon is backing a gas plant in Pecos County, Texas with 35 turbines and up to 7.65 gigawatts to run a data center off the grid, permitted for 33 million tons of carbon dioxide a year. Cleanview counts 59 data centers planning roughly 90 gigawatts of their own behind-the-meter power.

That generation is landing in rural counties near gas production, where some approvals clear in days with no public notice. Local officials should expect the turbines to arrive before the hearings do.

OpenAI Foundation gives $100 million to fund state AI implementation for public health

The OpenAI Foundation committed $100 million to the Breakthroughs to Follow-Through Initiative with the Common Health Coalition, funding AI tools for state and local public health work starting with hepatitis C treatment. Alabama, Illinois, Louisiana and Massachusetts are first, with more states named within six months. Also covered by Route Fifty.

Local nonprofits distribute the grants and jurisdictions choose their own tools, from outreach platforms to clinician copilots, so rural health departments in those four states should get in early. Hepatitis C treatment gaps run deepest in rural counties.

Greeneye Technology Expands Dealer Network with Intellifarms Northern Division

Greeneye Technology signed Intellifarms Northern Division of Britton, South Dakota as a dealer for its AI targeted spraying system across South Dakota, North Dakota, Iowa and Kansas. The camera-driven system cuts non-residual herbicide use by 80–90% and retrofits onto existing commercial sprayers with no per-acre software fees.

Adoption of in-field AI usually stalls on service, not hardware, and this puts installation and support inside the Upper Midwest. Growers squeezed on input costs can test it without replacing equipment.

Schools spend billions on AI, but struggle to figure out what's worth buying

Districts are buying into a $2.5 billion US AI education market projected to top $15 billion by 2033, largely vetting the tools themselves. Sumner County, Tennessee ran a five-day micro-pilot of the AI literacy tool Coursemojo before scaling it to half its sixth grade classrooms.

Small districts carry the same privacy and efficacy review burden as large ones, without the legal or IT staff to absorb it. The Southern Regional Education Board's AI procurement checklist and state master privacy agreements cut that load.

ACF awards $6M for testing predictive analytics in 10 child welfare jurisdictions

The Administration for Children and Families is giving roughly $600,000 each to 10 jurisdictions, including the Muscogee Creek Nation, Nebraska, Missouri and Oklahoma, to pilot predictive risk models for caseworker decision support starting Sept. 30. Tribal and rural-heavy states are directly involved, and grantees must build governance and evaluation processes. Strong tribal hook if you want a fourth health/human services item.