What We Learned from Partnering with Mastercard Impact Corps to Advance AEO’s Business Health Assessment

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 

Contact:
AEO Communications
Association for Enterprise Opportunity (AEO)
[email protected]
www.aeoworks.org 

 

Washington, D.C., October 8, 2025 – At AEO, we believe that small businesses deserve support that is personalized, high-quality, and scalable. That’s why we’ve been building the Business Health Assessment (BHA)—a tool designed to help community lenders and business support organizations deliver high-touch technical assistance more effectively.

Recently, we had the opportunity to partner with Mastercard through their Pro Bono Impact Corps program. Over several weeks, a team of Mastercard employees applied their expertise in research, AI, and product design to help us strengthen the BHA’s roadmap.

Here are a few key things we learned:

  • AEO is positioned to lead in responsible AI adoption. While many tools use AI superficially or only to drive product referrals, our work with Mastercard highlighted that AEO’s Business Health Assessment can set the standard for responsible, diagnostic-driven AI integration in the small business support field.
  • Our coaching-first approach is unique. The team conducted a scan of comparable business assessment tools and confirmed that very few combine diagnostics with the support of a coach. This reinforces our belief that relationships and trust are central to effective business assistance.
  • Building with the ecosystem for the ecosystem. Mastercard helped us sketch a blueprint for using AI responsibly. This includes developing a “prompt engineering playbook” in partnership with business coaches that can generate recommendations aligned to where a business is in its journey.
  • User experience matters. We prototyped a conversational intake process that makes the BHA feel less like filling out a form and more like answering guided questions. This could reduce friction and help entrepreneurs share their needs more openly.

For AEO, this collaboration underscored the power of cross-sector partnership. Mastercard’s expertise gave us practical next steps and new ways of thinking about how to responsibly apply AI to small business support.

As we move into the next phase of development, we’re committed to testing these ideas with our partners in the field, ensuring that the BHA continues to be built with the ecosystem, for the ecosystem.

Stay tuned—we’ll be sharing more about what’s next for the BHA, including opportunities for business support organizations and funders to get involved.