Trump's New AI Council: What It Means for Small Business

The White House has its AI advisory team. Small businesses are not on it.

President Trump appointed 13 tech leaders to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) in late March. The roster reads like a who’s who of Big Tech: Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang, Larry Ellison, Lisa Su, Sergey Brin, Marc Andreessen, Michael Dell. David Sacks, who served as the White House AI and crypto czar, co-chairs the council alongside Michael Kratsios.

The council’s mandate is broad — AI research, chip development, workforce strategy, national security. Its first order of business is pushing the national AI legislative framework the White House released on March 20, which calls for a single federal standard to replace the growing patchwork of state AI laws.

If you run a small business using AI tools, these appointments matter. The people in the room shape the rules you will operate under.

What happened

The roster

PCAST can hold up to 24 members. Trump filled the first 13 seats with a clear pattern — hardware, infrastructure, and capital:

• Jensen Huang (NVIDIA) and Lisa Su (AMD) — the two companies that control the AI chip market
• Larry Ellison (Oracle) and Michael Dell (Dell) — cloud infrastructure and enterprise computing
• Mark Zuckerberg (Meta) and Sergey Brin (Google co-founder) — AI platform builders
• Marc Andreessen — venture capital, prolific AI startup investor
• Jacob DeWitte and Bob Mumgaard — nuclear fusion founders, signaling the administration’s focus on AI energy demands
• David Sacks (co-chair) — transitioning from his 130-day AI czar role into a permanent advisory position

Who is missing

Two names stand out by their absence: Elon Musk and Sam Altman. Both lead frontier AI companies (xAI and OpenAI). Both are locked in federal lawsuits against each other. Neither sits on the council.

Also absent: anyone who runs a small business, a local development district, or a Main Street operation. The council is built for infrastructure scale, not storefront scale.

Why this matters for small businesses

The council will shape AI regulation

Sacks told Bloomberg the council will focus on AI, advanced semiconductors, quantum computing, and nuclear power. Near-term priority: pushing the national AI framework through Congress. That framework calls for preempting state AI laws — which matters if your business operates across state lines or uses AI tools that do.

Right now, at least 45 states have introduced AI bills covering everything from chatbot disclosure to algorithmic pricing. Nebraska, Maryland, and Maine all passed AI bills just last week. A federal preemption would replace that patchwork with one national standard.

For small businesses, a single standard is generally simpler. You would not need to worry about whether your AI scheduling tool complies differently in West Virginia than it does in Virginia. But the standard matters. A framework written by hardware CEOs and venture capitalists may not account for how a plumber in Charleston uses AI differently than how Meta deploys it at scale.

The hardware focus signals cheaper compute ahead

The roster leans hard into infrastructure — chips, data centers, energy. That is not accidental. NVIDIA and AMD control the GPU market. Oracle and Dell build the servers. The nuclear fusion founders suggest the administration takes AI’s energy demands seriously.

For small businesses, this translates to a bet on driving down the cost of running AI. The Stanford AI Index released today found that inference costs for GPT-3.5-level performance dropped 280 times in 18 months. If this council accelerates chip production and energy infrastructure, those cost declines should continue — making the AI tools you already use cheaper to operate.

No small business seat at the table

The council includes CEOs managing billions in revenue. It includes the investors who fund the companies building the tools. It does not include the 33.2 million small businesses that the SBA says make up 99.9% of U.S. firms.

This is not unusual — PCAST has always been a heavyweight advisory body. But it means the small business perspective on AI policy will need to come from other channels: the SBA, trade associations, and direct public comment on proposed regulations.

Our take

The hardware-first composition of this council is actually encouraging for small businesses, even without direct representation.

The companies driving AI costs down are the ones sitting in the room. When NVIDIA ships more chips and Oracle builds more data centers, the cost of the AI tools you use declines. PwC’s 2026 AI study found that 75% of AI’s economic gains currently flow to just 20% of companies. Cheaper infrastructure is one of the fastest ways to close that gap.

The bottom line: This council will make AI cheaper and faster to deploy. Whether it also makes AI policy work for small businesses depends on who else gets heard.

What is missing from the conversation

• Small business compliance costs. The national AI framework talks about preempting state laws, but says little about how small businesses will afford to comply with whatever replaces them.
• Rural infrastructure. Cheaper chips do not help much if your county still has spotty broadband. AI tools need connectivity to work.

What you should do

Watch these three things

1. The federal preemption debate. If Congress moves on a national AI standard this year, it will affect every business that uses AI tools. Track it through the SBA Office of Advocacy and your local trade association.
2. Inference cost trends. The tools you use will get cheaper. If you have been holding off on AI adoption because of cost, revisit your budget quarterly.
3. State law deadlines. Until federal preemption passes, state AI laws still apply. The AI legislation tracker from Troutman Pepper updates weekly.

Get ahead of the shift

If your business already uses AI tools — chatbots, scheduling, review management — document what you use and how. When new federal rules arrive, you will need that inventory. If you have not started with AI yet, the policy direction is clear: this administration wants businesses to adopt it.

Trying to figure out where AI fits in your business? Talk to our team — we help Appalachian businesses navigate the AI landscape without the jargon or the hype.