AI

Mandel West Palm AI Ladder for Owners: Intro to AI in Small Business Oct. 22 — Register Opens Sep. 22

Mandel Clematis ladder for Palm Beach owners: Accounting Basics Oct. 15, AI in Action Oct. 19, Intro to AI in Small Business Oct. 22 — registration for the full-day intensive opens Tue Sep. 22 at 9:30 a.m. ET.

By Brian D'Antoni 9 min read
Mandel Public Library Clematis entrance with Career & Technology cue; titled West Palm AI ladder for owners — Intro to AI in Small Business Oct. 22, register opens Sep. 22.

On Clematis Street in downtown West Palm Beach, the Mandel Public Library does what a serious public building should do when the workweek gets noisier than the tools owners actually own: it puts skill on the calendar. This fall the Career and Technology Programs desk is stacking three same-building sessions owners can treat as one ladder — bookkeeping daylight, a weeknight AI tools lab, then a full-day Intro to AI in Small Business intensive — instead of three disconnected “maybe later” links.

The centerpiece is Thursday, October 22, 2026, 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Eastern, in the Clematis Room at 411 Clematis Street, West Palm Beach, FL 33401. According to the live WhoFi event page, Melanie Roger of Zeus Financial & Consulting Services presents a full-day intensive framed for small-business owners who want to understand how to scale with and without artificial intelligence. Registration is required. Lunch is provided. The category on the listing is Adult Job Help; the audience line is Adults; the format is in person.

Why this package lands today — Monday, September 21, 2026 — is the registration clock on that same page: Registration Opens on Tuesday, Sep 22 2026, 9:30 a.m. That is tomorrow morning. Owners who wait for a friend to forward a flyer are inventing a seat that the library has not yet opened for claim. This Gazette feature is the Palm Beach / SoFla companion feel to the already-live Broward Library–SCORE AI literacy ladder: different county, different building, same owner problem — public AI literacy that is calendar-real, not vendor theater.

Why tomorrow’s 9:30 a.m. open matters more than October’s brochure

October 22 is roughly four weeks out from this pull. That is enough runway for an owner to clear a Thursday, rearrange coverage, and decide whether the full day is the right rung — or whether the earlier ladder steps on October 15 and October 19 should come first. It is not enough runway if you treat registration as something that “opens sometime in September” and then discover the button went live while you were on a job site.

The Intro to AI listing is explicit: registration is required, and the open time is printed as Tuesday, September 22, 2026, 9:30 a.m. Until that minute, the page shows the open message rather than a live Register form. That is the why-now. Set a phone alarm. Open the Intro to AI in Small Business event page before 9:30 a.m. Eastern. Complete whatever fields WhoFi asks for when the button appears. Screenshot the confirmation. A calendar hold on your phone is not a registration.

Career and Technology Programs organizes the listing. The published phone is (561) 868-7760. Use it for questions the page does not answer — including cost language if you need a spoken confirmation, capacity questions after the open, accessibility, or whether a library card is expected. This Gazette will not invent a fee table, a remaining-seat count, or a walk-up promise the WhoFi page does not print.

The same-building ladder: three Mandel dates, one Clematis address

Treat the next three weeks as one Career and Technology path at Mandel, not three separate articles fighting for attention. All three land at the Mandel Public Library of West Palm Beach, 411 Clematis Street, under the same organizer line — Career and Technology Programs, (561) 868-7760 — and all three appear on the library’s upcoming WhoFi calendar in the September 21–November 30 window scraped for this pull.

Rung one — Small Business Accounting Basics. Thursday, October 15, 2026, 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Eastern, Clematis Room, Adult Job Help, Adults, in person. Primary page: event 344192. On this pull the registration form is already live and the page shows 12 seats available, with a maximum of 1 attendee per registration. The published title is accounting basics. The visible description currently mirrors the entrepreneur / scale-with-and-without-AI framing and lunch language also used on the October 22 Intro page, with Melanie Roger of Zeus Financial & Consulting Services named the same way. Owners should register against the title and clock on the live page, call (561) 868-7760 if they need a curriculum readout that the blurb does not separately spell out, and not invent a QuickBooks syllabus this Gazette cannot see.

Rung two — AI in Action: Tools That Work for You, Version 2.0. Monday, October 19, 2026, 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. Eastern, Computer Lab, Adult Computers & Technology, Adults, in person. Primary page: event 341884. The WhoFi copy frames the evening as learning about different AI programs and how to make them work for you. Intermediate computer skills and registration are required. The description also states that registration begins two weeks before the event; on this September 21 pull the Register form is already open and shows 12 seats available, maximum of 1 attendee per registration. This is the weeknight tools rung — shorter than the Thursday intensives, lab-based, skill-gated by the library’s own intermediate-computer-skills line.

Rung three — Intro to AI in Small Business (centerpiece). Thursday, October 22, 2026, 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Eastern, Clematis Room, Adult Job Help, Adults, in person. Primary page: event 344194. Full-day intensive. Melanie Roger, Zeus Financial & Consulting Services. Scale with and without AI, as published. Lunch provided. Registration required. Registration opens Tuesday, September 22, 2026, 9:30 a.m. Eastern.

Same address. Same organizer phone. Different rooms for the weeknight lab versus the Clematis Room Thursdays. Different clocks. One owner decision tree: do you need the October 15 full day, the October 19 lab, the October 22 intensive, or a stack of two or three if your calendar and the live seat counters allow it.

What the October 22 intensive is — and is not — on the published page

Melanie Roger is credited on the Intro listing as presenting from Zeus Financial & Consulting Services. The page’s own sentence is the safest owner brief: a full-day intensive workshop to help small business owners understand how to scale their businesses both with and without artificial intelligence. That “with and without” clause matters. It is not a promise that every process must be automated by Friday. It is literacy about judgment — where AI compresses work, and where human systems still carry the business.

Lunch is provided. Registration is required. The session is in person in the Clematis Room. Eastern Time is printed on the page. Those are locked facts for this pull. What the page does not publish in the scraped main content — and what this Gazette therefore will not invent — includes a minute-by-minute agenda, a vendor tool list, a guaranteed ROI, a remaining-seat counter while registration is still closed, and an explicit “Free” / price line on the event description. If cost confirmation matters to your P&L before you clear the day, call Career and Technology Programs at (561) 868-7760 and ask in one sentence. Do not treat a blank fee line as a published fee table.

For owners who already sat through Broward’s library–SCORE fork, the Mandel intensive is the Palm Beach daylight version of the same literacy problem: stop collecting tip screenshots and put a real Thursday on the calendar inside a public building that already exists on Clematis. For owners who have never touched a library career program, start with the registration open — not with a shopping list of chatbot brands.

Who should claim a seat — and who should send a deputy

Strong fits: West Palm Beach and Palm Beach County small-business owners, solo operators, franchisees running a local P&L, creators who sell as a business rather than as a hobby, and managers who can clear a Thursday without collapsing coverage. Owners who know AI is already in their customers’ hands but have not built a shop-level rule for what gets automated, what gets reviewed, and what never leaves a staffer’s desk. Teams that want the October 19 Computer Lab tools night as a warm-up and the October 22 intensive as the decision day. Accounting-curious operators who can use October 15 as the financial-hygiene rung before the AI week — provided they confirm with the library that the Accounting Basics room matches the title they registered for.

Send a deputy or skip: Anyone expecting a vendor demo day that ends in a software contract. Anyone who needs a private consulting engagement disguised as a library workshop. Founders hunting incubator admit or capital intros — use other Gazette apply maps for those desks; Mandel’s Career and Technology listings are skill and job-help programming, not pitch night. Operators who cannot attend in person at 411 Clematis Street should not burn a registration if the page’s mode stays Offline / in person.

Prep before you walk in (paper or phone): legal business name and the DBA customers actually use; three workflows that eat hours every week; one line for data you will not paste into a consumer AI tool; questions for Melanie Roger’s “with and without” frame — where would AI help Monday, and where would it create risk; and, for the October 19 lab, honest confirmation that your intermediate computer skills match the listing’s requirement.

How this stacks with Broward and other SoFla AI desks

Mandel’s Clematis ladder is Palm Beach’s public-building path. Broward already has a reported Gazette map for the Library–SCORE AI literacy ladder. Those are companion desks, not substitutes. A Fort Lauderdale lab night does not register you for West Palm. A West Palm intensive does not replace a Broward SCORE recording policy.

If you are stacking October across counties, keep the products separate and light-link only what is live: FIU Business AI 305 owner-prep for the denser Miami-day product, and Delray Chamber Chasing AI Session 1 — Oct. 16 for the Palm Beach Chamber conversation rung. Honest stack for this season: Broward Library/SCORE = questions and fork literacy. FIU AI 305 = one dense campus day. Delray Chamber = membership-room conversation. Mandel Clematis = West Palm Career and Technology ladder with a full-day Oct. 22 centerpiece. Pick the desk that matches the job this month. Do not paste one program’s promises onto another’s registration form.

Owner act path — what to do before 9:30 a.m. Tuesday

  1. Bookmark the three primary WhoFi pages tonight: Accounting Basics — Oct. 15, AI in Action v2.0 — Oct. 19, Intro to AI in Small Business — Oct. 22.
  2. Decide your stack: Oct. 15 only, Oct. 19 only, Oct. 22 only, or two/three if your calendar and the live seat lines allow.
  3. If Oct. 15 or Oct. 19 still show seats when you click, register those now — they are already open on this pull.
  4. Set an alarm for Tuesday, September 22, 2026, 9:25 a.m. Eastern. At 9:30 a.m., register for Intro to AI on event 344194.
  5. Call (561) 868-7760 for anything the page leaves blank — cost confirmation, card requirements, accessibility, or curriculum clarity on Accounting Basics.
  6. Re-check the upcoming calendar the week you attend; WhoFi pages move.

Lead from this September 21 pull to October 22 is more than one week — pass for this Gazette feature. Use the runway. The scarce resource tomorrow morning is not motivation. It is the registration open printed on the library’s own page.

Primary sources for this pull (Sept. 21, 2026 ET): Intro to AI in Small Business; Small Business Accounting Basics; AI in Action: Tools That Work for You, Version 2.0; Mandel upcoming calendar; organizer phone Career and Technology Programs (561) 868-7760. Companion Gazette (HTTP 200): Broward Library–SCORE AI literacy ladder. Pages move. Verify before you clear a Thursday.

Verified from Mandel WhoFi primaries, checked September 21, 2026 (ET).

Q&A for Owners

When does registration open for Intro to AI in Small Business?
Tuesday, September 22, 2026, at 9:30 a.m. Eastern, per the live WhoFi page for event 344194.

Where is the workshop?
Mandel Public Library of West Palm Beach, 411 Clematis Street, West Palm Beach, FL 33401 — Clematis Room for the October 22 intensive (and for October 15 Accounting Basics on this pull).

Who presents the October 22 intensive?
Melanie Roger from Zeus Financial & Consulting Services, as credited on the library event page.

Is lunch included?
The Intro to AI page states lunch is provided. Registration is required.

What else is on the same-building ladder?
Small Business Accounting Basics on Thursday, October 15, 10:00 a.m.–3:00 p.m. Eastern, and AI in Action: Tools That Work for You, Version 2.0 on Monday, October 19, 6:00–8:00 p.m. Eastern — both at the same Clematis Street address under Career and Technology Programs.

Who do I call with questions?
Career and Technology Programs at (561) 868-7760.

Filed Under ai small-business west-palm-beach palm-beach entrepreneurship