  Small business owners (SBOs), specially women, face several challenges in
everyday life, especially when asking for microcredit loans from financial
institutions. Usual difficulties include low credit scores, unbaked situations,
outstanding debts, informal employment situations, inability to showcase their
payable capacity, and lack of financial guarantor. Moreover, SBOs often need
help applying for microcredit loans due to the lack of information on how to
proceed. The task of asking for a loan is a complex practice, and asymmetric
power relationships might emerge, but that benefits micro-entrepreneurs only
sometimes. In this paper, we interviewed 20 women entrepreneurs living in a
low-income community in Brazil. We wanted to unveil value tensions derived from
this practice that might influence the design of AI technologies for the
public. In doing so, we used a conversational system as a probe to understand
the opportunities for empowering their practices with the support of AI
multimedia conversational systems. We derived seven recommendations for
designing AI systems for evaluating micro-business health in low-income
communities.
