Codefi now runs programs in all 114 Missouri counties and works with organizations in other states. Our headquarters is at 338 Broadway in downtown Cape Girardeau, where it has been for eleven years, and where most of our team still lives.
Everything we take statewide gets built and tested here first, and the newest thing we have built is a good example.
The Missouri Technology Corporation awarded us more than $269,000 that allows us to open two programs at our Cape Girardeau office. Both are sponsored. Both are open to anyone in southeast Missouri.
A sponsored seat, and a machine you can run
The AI Builders Lab is a shared workspace for people who are shipping something with AI — not kicking the tires. Seats are sponsored and include membership in the coworking community. You apply and tell us what you are building.
One of the benefits is the AI hardware, which is now installed and running. It means you can run AI models locally, in the building, without usage limits, without credits running out mid-project, and without your data leaving the room. If you work with client records, customer financials, or anything else you cannot paste into a public tool, you already know why that matters.
One night a month, one industry at a time
TAI Industry Nights start September 2 and run the first Wednesday of every month, 5:30 to 6:30. Sponsored, no registration, come as you are.
Each month a different industry takes the mic — real estate in October, legal in November, construction and manufacturing in December, then banking, education, medical offices, nonprofits, insurance, and retail through next June. These are not vendor demos. They are local practitioners describing what they tried, what broke, and what stuck.
If you have been meaning to figure out what AI can mean for your business and have not found a good entry point, this is the entry point. Bring one problem from your week.
And training that assumes you are not an engineer
Alongside those, our Cape-based AI workforce training team is running the Show-Me Network Small Business Training Series — no-cost hour-long virtual sessions built around actual work. Marketing content on September 8, the administrative tasks you keep putting off on October 13, and holiday season prep on November 19. Register once and you are in for all of them.
The premise underneath all of this: the most valuable person in an AI project is rarely the most technical person in the building. It is the person who has run a process for six years and knows exactly where it breaks. We spent a decade training people to become software developers. We now spend our time giving the people you already employ better tools for the work they already own.
That shift is why we rebuilt this organization from the ground up in February, and why we describe ourselves as an AI-native economic development organization rather than one that added AI to what it was already doing.
Why it lands here
Cape Girardeau is where we test things. The AgTech Vibeathon we ran here is the clearest recent proof — 65 people spent a weekend building against real agriculture problems, and two companies came out of it that are operating today.
Our board vice chair Chris Dittmer and I talked through all of this at the Chamber’s First Friday Coffee this month, including the parts that were hard: the federal and state funding that dried up, the programs we closed, and the people we had to let go. If there is one thing I would want this region to take from that conversation, it is that the rebuild was not something that happened somewhere else and got shipped back. It happened here.
AI Industry Nights — first Wednesday, monthly, 5:30–6:30 p.m., 338 Broadway, Suite 601. Free, no registration.
AI Builders Lab → apply for a free seat at codefiworks.com/cape-hub.
Small business AI training — register once for all remaining sessions at codefiworks.com/campaigns/show-me-network-small-business-training-series.
Learn fast. Build right. Gain traction.