Why Small Businesses Need Technology Without Losing Their Soul

Editor's note: This is part two of a three-part interview with Dr. Medai Abadi (Dr. Mohammadmehdi Ezzatabadipour), founder of Medai Digital LLC and Royal Windoor's external Technology and Marketing Partner.

Why did you leave corporate work to build Medai Digital?

Dr. Medai: I am grateful for my corporate career. It gave me difficult problems, talented colleagues, and the chance to build systems at industrial scale. I did not leave because every corporation is bad. I left because I could no longer wake up every morning without trying to apply what I had learned to a mission that felt personally necessary.

I kept seeing a technology gap. Large enterprises could afford data systems, optimization, AI, cloud infrastructure, serious websites, and disciplined marketing. Honest small and mid-size businesses were often offered disconnected tools, empty slogans, or automation they could not control. These businesses employ families and preserve local knowledge, yet they are expected to compete with platforms that possess far more data and capital.

What experience did you bring from research and industry?

Dr. Medai: During a 2019 internship at Anadarko, I worked on AI and cloud systems shortly before Occidental Petroleum completed its acquisition of the company. My first full-time role after the PhD was as an AI and research scientist and engineer at Corva, applying real-time data, physics, and machine learning in energy. At Enterprise Products, I served as a Senior Data Scientist working across machine learning, software, optimization, predictive maintenance, and product development.

I also co-founded Kepler Energy, focused on physics-informed energy simulation, and Propsight, an early-stage real-estate intelligence venture. Those companies are separate from Medai Digital. Together, these experiences taught me how to move between equations, infrastructure, product decisions, and the person who ultimately needs an answer.

Who mentored you as you moved from physics into industry?

Dr. Medai: My industry education came through people who let me see how experienced leaders think. At Corva, Curtis Cheatham, Vice President of the Corva Research and Development team, mentored me as I learned to connect research science, engineering judgment, physics-based reasoning, and AI with operations running in the real world.

Dr. Mo Kamyab was one of my technical mentors during that first Corva chapter. His research record connects petroleum engineering, drilling, computational fluid dynamics, numerical simulation, neural networks, and software development. He helped me understand that research code becomes industrial technology only when the physics, implementation, and operating conditions agree.

During my 2019 Anadarko internship, Jeremy L. Graybill, Ingrid Tobar, and Dr. Yuxing Ben were mentors to me. Jeremy led data science and advanced analytics at Anadarko and now works in engineering leadership across AI, data, analytics, and governance at Crown Castle. Yuxing, whose work is collected on her Google Scholar profile, provided technical supervision and advised my internship research. That work produced the 2020 SPE paper Real-Time Hydraulic Fracturing Pressure Prediction with Machine Learning. She later served as an SPE Distinguished Lecturer for 2021 to 2022. From the three of them, I learned that an industrial model has to survive engineering reality, organizational constraints, governance, and the questions of the domain experts who will use it.

While I was at Enterprise Products, I began serving Texas Monthly through its affiliated ownership relationship with Enterprise Products Company. Robert Davila, Vice President of Research and Data Insights at Texas Monthly, became a mentor. Texas Monthly's ownership announcement records that the magazine was purchased in 2019 by Texas Monthly, LLC, an affiliate of privately held Enterprise Products Company chaired by Randa Duncan Williams, daughter of Enterprise Products founder Dan Duncan. That work helped me understand ethical journalism and the responsibility involved when cloud infrastructure, analytics, language models, and AI enter a media institution. Technology must strengthen the publication's ability to inform people without quietly replacing editorial judgment.

In the early days of Medai Digital and Propsight, Dr. Kaveh Ahmadi was also a mentor and startup adviser. His academic publication record spans petroleum engineering, minimum miscibility pressure, gas flooding, and enhanced oil recovery. He completed a 2011 PhD in Petroleum Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin under Professor Russell T. Johns. His dissertation, Advances in Calculation of Minimum Miscibility Pressure, and their earlier paper A Practical Method for Minimum Miscibility Pressure Estimation of Contaminated Gas Mixtures show the depth behind his later work developing scalable enhanced-oil-recovery products for unconventional assets.

I spent a large part of my own career developing research, products, and technology for oil and gas. That work brought me into sustained collaboration with petroleum engineers, scientists, and domain specialists. They taught me that a technically elegant model is only one part of the job. It must also respect geology, field operations, economic constraints, safety, and the experience of the engineer who has to trust the result.

These mentors came from different parts of industry, but the shared lesson was consistent: technical talent is not enough. You need humility, domain knowledge, governance, product discipline, and responsibility for what the system does after it leaves your laptop.

Why do you consider that gap a community problem?

Dr. Medai: Because small business is not a sentimental side story in the American economy. The U.S. Small Business Administration's Office of Advocacy reports that small businesses employ 45.9 percent of private-sector workers and contribute 43.5 percent of economic activity.

If that sector weakens, the damage is not limited to business owners. Local skills disappear. Communities depend on fewer employers. Wealth and decision-making become concentrated farther away from the people affected by them. Rich and poor eventually inherit a more fragile society.

What do you mean by ethical capitalism?

Dr. Medai: Capitalism is a great engine for experimentation, initiative, invention, and voluntary exchange. But power without responsibility degrades. When money becomes the only measure, competition can become corruption, monopoly, and control. A market that loses accountability can arrive at forms of concentrated authority that resemble the failures it once claimed to oppose.

Ethical capitalism asks a harder question than whether a transaction is legal or profitable. Did we create real utility? Did the client understand what they bought? Did the worker, customer, community, and business have a fair opportunity to benefit? Profit matters because a company must survive. Service gives that survival a reason.

How does economic independence relate to democracy?

Dr. Medai: This is my political and economic belief, not a theorem. Democracy works best when citizens can access reliable information and maintain enough economic independence to disagree, organize, change jobs, start companies, and participate without total dependence on one institution.

Entrepreneurship distributes some economic power back into communities. It does not solve every inequality, and a business owner is not automatically virtuous. But a world with many independent, informed, locally accountable producers is healthier than one where a handful of remote systems decide what work, speech, products, and opportunities survive.

Where do AI and mathematics fit into this mission?

Dr. Medai: Mathematics helps us see the system beneath the slogan. AI can help a small team analyze, communicate, automate, and respond at a level that once required a corporate department. That is powerful, but only if the business owns enough understanding to question the system.

At Medai Digital, we build websites, CRM operations, search systems, AI tools, and cloud infrastructure around the client's real process. Our access-controlled Smart Real Estate application is one example of translating data and AI into a usable vertical tool. The point is not to perform intelligence. The point is to make a difficult decision easier for a real person.

Will you work with any company willing to pay?

Dr. Medai: No. Selecting the right clients and partners is one of my largest responsibilities. I want Medai to become a force multiplier for ethical, hardworking people. If we amplify a dishonest business, our technology makes the damage more efficient.

We study the work, the people, the evidence, the client experience, and the willingness to improve. I look for owners who do not worship money, who are willing to lose a transaction rather than betray the service, and who accept that leadership means responsibility when nobody is watching. Once that is established, I can say: now it is our turn to bring our best to you.

What keeps this from becoming another polished mission statement?

Dr. Medai: Evidence and refusal. We should be able to show what we built, name what remains uncertain, record what failed, and refuse work that violates the principle. If ethical capitalism costs nothing, it is just branding.

I have 24 hours in a day like everybody else. My choice is to keep adding those hours to a cause: help useful local businesses gain modern capability without losing their independence, character, or human voice.