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Portable AI hardware is starting to look practical for small and mid-size businesses — but only if you understand what problem you’re trying to solve first.

If you run a small or medium-sized business and you’ve been paying attention to AI over the past year, you’ve probably noticed something new creeping into the conversation: portable AI accelerators that plug in over USB. They look like flash drives or dongles, but instead of storing data, they run AI workloads locally.