Local advocate on how people and businesses can benefit from Artificial Intelligence – NPR Illinois

Artificial intelligence is transforming the way people work, create, and solve problems—and Springfield-area AI educator Adam Gurski wants to help the community understand how to use it effectively.
Speaking on Community Voices with Randy Eccles, Gurski shared how his curiosity about AI began with early image-generation tools and evolved into using AI for coding, business automation, organization, and creative projects. He believes one of AI’s most overlooked strengths is its ability to help small businesses streamline operations and eliminate bottlenecks.
As an example, Gurski described a custom AI system he developed for a local heating and cooling company. By analyzing past estimates and reading handwritten notes, the system can automatically generate invoices and pricing proposals, saving significant time and reducing repetitive administrative work.
Beyond business applications, Gurski sees AI as a powerful tool for job seekers, artists, freelancers, and anyone looking to improve productivity. He emphasizes that AI should be viewed as a tool—not a replacement for human judgment. Human review, ethical use, and digital literacy remain essential, especially as AI-generated content becomes increasingly realistic.
While acknowledging concerns about privacy, misinformation, environmental impact, and intellectual property, Gurski believes understanding AI is becoming a critical modern skill. He predicts that in the near future, many people will have access to personal AI systems that run locally on their own devices, offering greater privacy and control.
His message is simple: learn what AI can do, understand its risks, and use it to amplify human creativity and capability.
The following was transcrived by AI with human review for readability.
Randy Eccles:
This is Community Voices in 91.9 UIS. I’m co-host Randy Eccles. Today, the neighbor we’re going to get to know is Adam Gurski. Welcome to the show, Adam.
Adam Gurski:
Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
Randy Eccles:
Adam, what’s your relationship with AI?
Adam Gurski:
I got really interested in the tools a few years ago when I started seeing programs that could take a text description and turn them into imagery. That was back when the images that would come out of those models were blurry colors and shapes of something That might have resembled what I was talking about. Now they’ve come as far as to being extremely hard to tell from a real photograph in quality. I got into its coding ability, its ability to make structure for me in my life because I’m very all over the place. I have ADHD for sure and I have a lot of ideas. Keeping track of all those things was difficult for me to do. I’ve learned to use AI to give me a structure to work from. Because I was playing with the imagery tools, I learned a lot more about the other aspects of AI and it was helpful for small businesses. It got locked. that people might not understand about AI is coding ability and because it has such a good ability to code, it can code customizable software for your business. I work for Dixon’s Heating and Cooling. They had a bottleneck. of the estimate cost. It would take a long time for him to go in. He still handwrites his notes on a pad, what they need. He would have to come back to his office and transfer that data into his computer because any kind of invoice that he sends, that’s going to have like three different tiers of options for the client and everything else that goes with it. He had so much invoice and estimate data, I can use AI to see the pattern in the way that he estimates. He can input his own handwritten notes with a picture or scan them in. And because AI can read handwriting and it has all the data that it needs to build an estimate just like he did. That’s all he needs to do now is put those handwriting notes into his computer and then the AI system that I’ve built will spit out the correct invoice with the correct parts and pricing and stuff like that because it’s grounded in the data that’s given.
Randy Eccles:
That used to be the challenge, right? If you thought, well, this could help my business out, but somehow, I’m going to have to get all that data entered.
Adam Gurski:
Yes, a lot of people actually have the data, but what AI helps them do is actually and put structure to that data so that they can understand it quicker themselves or that they can get to the answer that they want to get to but used to take a lot longer when they’re doing all the steps themselves. Like a data calculator, it can change one data form like a PDF file into a website using code. It’s structured on your data, but a lot more useful to you because you can see the website has graphs and information that you can process and understand easier than just a huge data sheet.
Randy Eccles:
If you want to learn more from Adam, our guest Adam Gurski: he’s got two speaking engagements coming up that you can attend to learn more.
Adam Gurski:
On June 10, I will be at the Springfield Lincoln Library. I’m going to be doing a general overview of AI tools. It’s going to be demonstration heavy. A quick overview at the start explains what AI’s impact is in our society right now. I call on the audience and demonstrate questions for them in real time. I’ll be doing a lot of editing of images, programming apps, and websites, all live in front of the audience, answering questions about how AI can have real world use cases in their life and in business. It can also help if you’re trying to find a job, creating a resume. If you’re a freelance business owner or artist, it will help you create a website to display all your work and make it look nice. There are various aspects that we’ll go over in the talk. I’d like the audience to take it wherever and I’ll help them understand, to produce something that they can utilize for themselves at the end of it.
Randy Eccles:
Free, open to the public at the Springfield Lincoln Library, Springfield’s Public Library. You have another event the next day.
Adam Gurski:
June 11, I’ll be at Chatham Public Library. I’ll be doing the exact same thing. Done several presentations already. I did one for the Athens Community Public Library as well. I will be in Chatham the very next day at 6 p.m. giving a similar presentation. If you don’t have the chance to make it on June 10, I’ll be in Chatham on June 11.
Randy Eccles:
Do you suggest people bring their laptops so they can follow along with what you’re demonstrating?
Adam Gurski:
Absolutely. If you want to come and bring your laptop, both of those places should have free public Wi-Fi. If you want to follow along with me, we can all do it together. I can answer real world questions in real time. I’ll be doing demos myself. There is a certain way to work with AI to get the best result, and I’ll help people understand how to curate their data and ask the right questions to get the best result for what they’re needing.
Randy Eccles:
June 10, at Lincoln Library, Springfield’s Public Library at 5:30 p.m., and then June 11, at Chatham Library at 6 p.m. You can’t avoid a conversation of AI right now without watching a people cringe for a variety of reasons. One, artists are legitimately concerned about their own work being appropriated. There are some AI services which purchase artist’s work and license it for the AI to work off. Not all AI works that way.
Adam Gurski:
That’s what I would like people to get out of this. During the talk I did with the seniors at the Athens Public Library, a lot of them came in with fear and skepticism of these tools. There is a lot to be concerned about. It’s a new powerful technology. It’s a new tool, but every new tool can be used for good or bad. I would encourage people to make sure that there are regulations on these things and that we are using AI properly. Soon, people may not understand that these models are being run on huge servers that only huge corporations can own. They’re distilling these models into small enough models so that you will be able to run them from consumer grade hardware. I see in the next few years, you’ll have your own personal AI that lives on your network that does not have to go out to the internet, that can build your website, that can help you with your finances, that never has to go out and touch a big corporation or the internet. Your data would be much more secure. Google has just recently put out a model that is better than the Frontier model, the state-of-the-art model from OpenAI a year and a half ago. That can live on consumer grade hardware. It’s not your grandma’s PC. Your kid’s gaming PC could run this large language model that can code you a website right now.
Randy Eccles:
What you’re saying about how AI helped a business client of yours, and you, I’ve seen where there’s so much going on these days and there are no administrative assistants at businesses like there used to be. There is potential there for learning how to use it so it does organize a lot of the things that may slow you down or that you just can’t get to that overwhelm you at work. Is that the type of thing you’ll show in one of these speaking engagements is how you can make AI help you get organized?
Adam Gurski:
I’ll be touching on some of those things that can help you get the work done quicker or get better work out of the same amount of time. Either it should speed up your work, and you will get done quicker or you spend the same amount of time and end up with a much better product. Both of those things I’ll be doing. It’s a short talk. I would like to do a series eventually. I do consultations for businesses and whoever else wants to learn more about AI tools. It would take several courses to dive into all aspects of AI to get your complete system, your whole business set up. I can give you tips and tricks in the one-hour presentation that would help you fix a bottleneck.
Randy Eccles:
What’s the best way to contact you?
Adam Gurski:
My website is AdamGurski-Creative.com. That’s a great way to get a hold of me. My e-mail is on there.
Randy Eccles:
Lately I’ve seen people upset that you’re trying to learn AI or see what it can do. They’re accusatory for asking AI what the weather is. Saying any AI query uses water and energy, creating the need for these massive data centers that are having negative impact. There is a lot to that, but any business activity has some sort of energy or resource usage. Is this transition to AI going to challenge us environmentally?
Adam Gurski:
There are a lot of concerns there. I don’t work for a big AI studio. I’m just a person that has found these tools useful. These tools have allowed me to do a lot more than I could have on my own. These frontier models are always going to need these huge data centers to push the intelligence further. There absolutely should be regulation. On some data centers, the water system, it’s a contained system, they’re reusing the water. Power is a huge issue. The plan that they first started telling everybody was that every new data center is going to get a power plant. That would have been great for each community if they also installed the power plant with the data center. If they continue to install data centers without additional power that will cause a problem. We should hold these corporations accountable to do it ethically. I feel powerless to make it stop. I do want to empower people with the tools that already exist to use them.
You could download your own model. It would be an especially useful model, and you wouldn’t even have to connect to the internet. If you’re worried about power usage, it’s the same power if you were going to be playing a video game on your computer or using your cell phone to look up research on Google. Soon, the individual power is going to be consumer grade energy consumption just like any other technology device.
Randy Eccles:
The Illinois General Assembly just joined New York and California in passing AI audits and regulation of AI companies. There is that type of accountability catching up with the technology.
Now you have been able to develop your skills. Some UIS professors who work on the AI committee said not learning AI is like not learning to read. It’s going to be that type of skill that you need to understand. As you develop your skill, what’s your trajectory?
Adam Gurski:
To each their own, I see the benefit for people that want to live in a log cabinet in the woods. There’s a benefit to that style of life. If you’re going to operate in the business world of the United States of America, it’s definitely advantageous to learn these tools. It’s extremely beneficial. I’ve created structure out of it. I’m very unstructured by myself. Now all my communications are with an organization bot. I have a conversation with it and it’s already logging that idea in the correct spot. I’m able to pull it up again. I’m not searching for it every time. I don’t know how to code, but now I can build websites. I’ve built applications that are beneficial and save time and money for businesses. I can create visuals that are branded. Artists can also use it to train it on their own materials in their style. They should have the right to say, “Hey, I don’t want AI to be trained in general for everyone to use my style. They can use it for their own.” That’s an ethical thing that a person has the decision to use with any tool. You’ve been able to copy people’s work for a long time. AI is a powerful tool that makes it easier to do that, but it’s still your ethical choice to make.
Randy Eccles:
Did you produce some visuals that got used by Fat Boy Slim?
Adam Gurski:
He has a song called Right Here, Right Now, from the early 1990s. They put out a music video for it. It starts with a single cell organism, and it slowly evolves into the human and then the human starts eating cheeseburgers and he sits down on a bench and that’s how the video ends. I created it with AI because they used puppetry, but I used photographic images. They were AI generated images. The same transformation all the way up to Man Finding Fire. I tagged him and I put his song Right Here Right Now to it. He saw it and asked if he could use it in his visuals.
Randy Eccles:
At a show?
Adam Gurski:
Yes, at a show! Can you do that?
First, he asked, “Can you make this in a widescreen format? “And I said, “Whatever you need, we’ll cut it up however you’d like.”
Randy Eccles:
Did you get compensated at all for that?
Adam Gurski:
No, this was the biggest artist I’ve worked with. I’ve worked with other artists, other creators on collaboration posts and all were working together on the project. I’d had been exposed to larger audiences, but this one was the first one that… he’s a Grammy award-winning artist! I didn’t want to lose the opportunity by trying to get compensated. It was an honor to have my work displayed on a screen. He was super nice. He sent me a video of the concert where he used it. Seeing people’s phones go up and start recording my visual, it was neat. It was a cool experience.
Randy Eccles:
It’s useful to be able to tell other prospective clients.
Adam Gurski:
Yes, absolutely.
Randy Eccles:
As public media tries to figure out where we can deploy AI — we don’t want AI to be reporting the news — but we have found it useful at transcribing audio, like for this interview, asking for a summary. Every time we do that, we know we must have a human review of the transcript.
Adam Gurski:
Oh yes.
Randy Eccles:
We make sure there aren’t hallucinations where the interpretation is not accurate. That human review, that human edit makes it so that we get it right. We revamp some of the tone to put it in our style as an individual producer. There are areas where it saves a lot of time. If you had to transcribe something by ear and hand, it would take forever.
Adam Gurski:
Yeah, I will cover that in my presentation. Anthropic, it’s a company that develops AI. They’re responsible for Claude. They are trying to be ethical about it.
Randy Eccles:
They’re the company that pulled out of a defense contract.
Adam Gurski:
The government wanted to use their tools for war and they didn’t want that. They pulled out of the deal. I never would suggest anybody just copy and paste whatever the AI output is. Even when I’m creating an app, you want to do multiple tests with multiple various kinds of estimates, and it must be successful multiple times and then every time you should still check that. That’s with any kind of digital software or human work. I did a presentation for District 202 Petersburg Education System. They were reviewing a way to submit their new report cards at the end of the year. No AI involved. They wanted to assure, at the end of this, all the numbers are correct with the data.
Randy Eccles:
You can use a spreadsheet and have one typo in a cell formula and the result is off.
Anything else you’d like to share with us about AI at the local level? It’s become such a huge conversation nationally. We’re seeing major companies, Meta, just announced they’re going to start charging subscription fees for a lot of the features of their products that use AI or have an AI influence. Every AI company has a premium level that has fees involved, but there’s still been this robust free area that people can play with, try out, and use. Do you think this is the little taste at the beginning and eventually it’s going to cost you to use it?
Adam Gurski:
There’s always going to be free AIs for you to use. They’re not going to let you use their top tier models or their most intelligent models, but they’ll serve their lower tier cost effective models for free. Whether you use it or not, that’s your own decision. should learn what it’s capable of so that you can be aware of what other people are going to be able to do with it. There is concern. You can use it for good, and you can use it for bad. When you’re using it for bad, the capabilities, its voice copying capability, its ability to make photorealistic videos, people that you know and love on a website that looks legit, you really have to do your homework as far as what you believe on a screen nowadays. I hope people stop believing everything that they see on their screens.
Randy Eccles:
Digital literacy is huge and being able to figure out what’s misinformation or disinformation is tough. Hopefully, there’s some sort of regulation that can be devised, although there’s always a way around it. AI is fast and complex. How did you get into AI? Did you self-teach yourself? Did you get a degree? How did you get into this?
Adam Gurski:
Self-taught. I’ve always been super into computers and art and music. That’s why I was like, “Oh man, you can make a picture with a text?” I started talking to a friend after I got into that, and he started in a separate way. He got into the coding side a lot earlier, and he still works for Brandt. He helped it plan how to build an app that basically revolutionized the way that company does sales, instead of marketing broadly all of their products everywhere, they can isolate where that marketing goes to when the people that grow blueberries only live in this small section of the company. They don’t have to broadcast it out to everybody. They can also implement personalized plans to do the treatments that they were selling to those people. He by himself built an app to revolutionize A multi-million-dollar worldwide company. My mind has gotten opened that these tools really are extremely beneficial if you learn how to use them correctly and multiply your work.
Randy Eccles:
Great for collaborative projects.
Adam Gurski:
Yes.
Randy Eccles:
We’ve been talking with Adam Gurski. How does someone reach you?
Adam Gurski:
AdamGursky-Creative.com is my website. Adam88gur@gmail.com is my e-mail address if you want to e-mail me. The website has some of the work that I’ve done and some of the case studies that I’ve created.
Randy Eccles:
You have an opportunity to see him for free. Try some things out June 10, at Lincoln Library, Springfield’s Public Library at 5:30 p.m. or June 11, at Chatham Library at 6 p.m. Thanks for joining us, Adam.
Adam Gurski:
Thank you so much for having me. It was a blast.

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